# Novella — Scp Necromancer New Mexico [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter2|Chapter 2 →]] --- # Chapter 1: Notification **POV:** Mai **Word Count Target:** 4,000 --- The encrypted burst hit Mai's comm unit at 3:07 AM. She knew the exact time because she was already awake, running spectral diagnostics on the Flagstaff containment breach samples, and the notification made her jump hard enough to knock a pen into the stabilization chamber. "Shit," she said, to no one. The pen was ruined. The samples were probably contaminated. And the burst was Priority Alpha, which meant someone on the fourteenth floor had stayed up late enough to care about whatever fresh hell was unfolding in New Mexico. Mai pulled up the dispatch with one hand and reached for a backup pen with the other. She was not losing another night's data because Foundation comms couldn't respect business hours. **SCP FOUNDATION — MTF THETA-9 DEPLOYMENT ORDER** **PRIORITY: ALPHA** **TIMESTAMP: 0307 MOUNTAIN STANDARD** **DESTINATION: SANTERO, NEW MEXICO** **CLASSIFICATION: KETER — ACTIVE NECROMANTIC SIGNATURE** **MISSION PARAMETERS: CONTAIN, EVALUATE, ELIMINATE IF NECESSARY** **DEPLOYMENT WINDOW: SIX (6) HOURS FROM ACKNOWLEDGMENT** Mai read it twice. A third time. Necromantic signature. Active. In a town called Santero, population roughly eight hundred, located in a part of New Mexico that maps marked with the gentle label UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY. Foundation-speak for "we don't have a station here and we don't want to talk about why." She closed the Flagstaff file. It could wait. Flagstaff couldn't compete with active necromancy, not in the same way that active necromancy probably shouldn't have been arriving on her personal comm unit at 3 AM instead of through proper Foundation channels. Unless. Unless someone on the fourteenth floor specifically wanted Theta-9. Specifically wanted Ace. Mai looked at the door to the room she shared with Ace. The katanas were visible through the gap. Ace slept with them within arm's reach, had since before they'd become whatever they were to each other. The blades caught the blue light of Mai's equipment and glowed faintly. Impossible, because they were supposed to be dormant. But nothing about Ace's katanas ever did what it was supposed to. "New Mexico," Mai murmured. "Of course it's New Mexico." She pulled up the Santero briefing packet attached to the deployment order. Thin. Suspiciously thin for a Keter event. One page of background, one page of recent incident reports, one page of initial Foundation observations. The background page said: *Santero, NM. County seat of Santero County. Population 847 (2020 census). Primary industries: ranching, small-scale tourism, light manufacturing. Notable history: site of multiple unsolved missing persons cases over past decade. No Foundation presence prior to current deployment.* Mai stared at the "unsolved missing persons" line. "Multiple." Three? Ten? Fifty? "Multiple" was the kind of word you used when you didn't want to admit you'd been tracking something for years and had done nothing about it. She clicked to the incident reports. **INCIDENT LOG — SANTERO ANOMALOUS ACTIVITY (SUMMARY)** *Year 1: One (1) reported sighting of deceased individual (Dolores Vega, deceased 1987) walking county roads. Sheriff's department investigation inconclusive. No Foundation action taken.* *Year 2: Two (2) reports of deceased individuals encountered in local businesses. Witnesses cooperative. Statements consistent with partial necromantic manifestation. Foundation declined deployment (priority queue).* *Year 3: Three (3) additional missing persons. Connection to prior incidents unclear. Foundation received anomaly report Form 23-B. Declined (resource constraints).* *Year 4: Two (2) confirmed raised witness events. Individuals (Daniel Acosta, Rosa Sanchez) demonstrated conscious communication and testified to specific criminal acts prior to return to deceased state. Testimonies provided to local law enforcement. Foundation received elevated anomaly report. Declined (Keter queue overflow).* *Year 5 (Current): Pattern escalation. Raised witness events now averaging one per week. Local coroner (Dr. Hector Vega) has filed formal request for Foundation assistance. Recommendation: MTF deployment for containment and evaluation.* Five years. Five years of someone raising the dead in a town small enough that everyone knew everyone, and the Foundation had declined deployment five separate times. Queue overflow. Resource constraints. Whatever comfortable bureaucratic language they'd used to decide that seven, ten, however many missing people weren't worth a priority flag. Mai's hand was shaking. She put the comm unit down. She thought about Ace, who had spent years not knowing why she sometimes felt the presence of things that weren't alive. She thought about Shammy, who could read the emotional weight of spaces the way other people read faces. She thought about what it would feel like to be dead and called back, asked questions you didn't want to answer, then released. Left to lie in the ground again knowing someone had reached into your rest and pulled you out for purposes you hadn't agreed to. She thought about the person doing the reaching. The necromancer. The one the Foundation had finally decided to care about, now that the situation had escalated beyond their comfortable declining thresholds. And she thought: they're sending us to kill her, probably. Because that's what Keter designations meant, in the end. Contain or eliminate. The Foundation's favorite binary. Mai stood up. Left the Flagstaff samples ruined on her desk. Walked to the bedroom door and leaned against the frame. Watching Ace sleep. Ace was curled on her side, both katanas within immediate reach, her breathing slow and even. In sleep, her face lost the focused intensity that made her look like a weapon even standing still. She looked young. She looked like someone who had been through things she didn't talk about and was still somehow intact. "New Mexico," Mai said, quietly. "Something you need to know." Ace's eyes opened. Not all the way. She slept lighter than anyone Mai had ever met, but she'd learned to wake incrementally, assessing threats without fully committing to consciousness. "What." "Necromancy signature. Active. We're being deployed." Ace was fully awake in the space of a breath. The katanas hadn't moved, but her body had shifted from rest to ready with no transition Mai could identify. "Where." "Santero, New Mexico." Ace sat up. Her eyes were doing the thing. The violet shimmer that meant Violet, the fragment she carries, was paying attention. "I've heard that name." Mai's chest tightened. "Heard it where?" "I don't..." Ace's frown was the kind she made when she was reaching for something and it kept slipping. "I don't remember. But it means something. Felt like it meant something when I read it." "Read it where? We just got the dispatch." Ace looked at her. The violet shimmer was fading back to normal. "I don't know, Mai. I don't know where I heard it." They looked at each other in the blue equipment-light, and Mai felt the weight of something she couldn't name. A pattern she didn't like. A coincidence that was probably not a coincidence. A deployment to a town with an active necromancy signature that Ace somehow already knew. "We should wake Shammy," Mai said. "Yeah." Ace hadn't moved. She was still looking at Mai like she was trying to communicate something she didn't have words for. "Mai. If this is..." "It's what?" Ace shook her head. "Nothing. Get Shammy. We need to talk before we acknowledge." Mai went to get Shammy. When she came back, Ace was standing by the window in just her underclothes, both katanas now strapped to her back, watching the sky like she could see weather patterns that hadn't formed yet. "She's awake," Mai said. "Barely. You know how she gets before deployments." "She's nervous." Ace didn't turn around. "The air outside is different. I can feel it." "You're feeling weather?" "I'm feeling something." Ace's hand went to her chest, the gesture Mai had learned meant she was tracking Violet's presence. "It's not weather. It's... pressure. Like the sky is waiting for something to happen." Shammy appeared in the doorway, 195 cm of sleep-disheveled storm elemental, her hair static-puffed from the pillow. "Someone want to tell me why I woke up feeling like the atmospheric pressure just dropped six millibars?" "Santero," Mai said. "New Mexico. Necromancy signature. Keter designation. We're being deployed." Shammy's expression shifted from sleepy confusion to sharp attention. "Keter. That's not... we don't usually get Keter. We get Euclid. We get the weird stuff that doesn't fit categories. Keter means..." "Keter means someone's scared," Mai finished. "And someone on the fourteenth floor is scared enough about a dead woman walking in New Mexico to break protocol and send us a direct dispatch." Ace finally turned from the window. Her eyes were fully violet now. Not the shimmer. The solid color. When Violet was fully present, Ace's irises became a deep, prismatic purple that caught light like something luminescent. "She's calling," Ace said. "The woman raising the dead. She's calling and she wants us to hear." Mai and Shammy looked at each other over Ace's head. Shammy shrugged. *Your guess is as good as mine.* Mai sighed. "Great," she said. "So we have a necromancer who knows we're coming, a fragment carrier who's already psychically connected to her, and zero useful briefing documents beyond 'contain, evaluate, eliminate.' Let's move." Ace's eyes faded back to their normal violet-with-shimmer. "You forgot 'eliminate if necessary.'" "I didn't forget." Mai picked up her gear bag. "I just don't think it means what they think it means." They had six hours before the deployment window closed. Mai planned to use every one of them. The briefing packet sat on her desk, thin and inadequate. Somewhere in New Mexico, a woman was raising the dead and asking questions the Foundation had decided weren't worth answering five years ago. Mai wasn't sure yet whether she was going to help her or stop her. But she was sure, with the bone-deep certainty that came from years of working with Ace and Shammy, that the answer wasn't going to be simple. --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter2|Chapter 2 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter1|← Chapter 1]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter3|Chapter 3 →]] --- # Chapter 2: Santero **POV:** Ace **Word Count Target:** 4,200 --- Ace felt it before the car stopped. The town had death in it. Not the fresh kind. Not violence or accident. This was older. Layered. The kind of death that got into the soil and stayed, that changed the chemical composition of the air until the plants that grew here tasted different and the people who lived here carried traces of it in their lungs without knowing. It was the death of a community. The death of hope. The death of eight hundred people who'd watched their neighbors disappear one by one and learned to stop asking questions. "Stop," she said. Mai braked without asking why. That was the thing about Mai. She'd learned years ago that when Ace said stop, you stopped, because Ace's instincts were better than anyone else's in the triad and questioning them later was better than ignoring them now. "We're here," Mai said. "I know." Ace rolled down her window. The heat hit her immediately. Dry and immediate, like opening an oven. And underneath the heat, the other thing. The waiting thing. The air was so full of old death that it tasted metallic. Like blood. Like old blood, blood that had been in the ground long enough to become part of the ground. The town of Santero spread out in front of them. A main street. A diner. A sheriff's station with two cars in the lot. A church with a faded blue dome. An abandoned gas station with windows that had been shot out. Route 66 remnants ran through the center of town like an old scar that had never quite healed. Ace closed her eyes. Reached for the resonance. It was everywhere. In the buildings, in the dirt, in the road. But there were concentrations. Places where the death was louder, where it had settled into the foundations of things and stayed. The sheriff's station had a low hum, like a refrigerator. The diner was quiet. Background noise. And the church... The church was loud. "Stop looking at the church," she said, without opening her eyes. "I'm not looking at anything." Mai's voice was carefully neutral. "What's wrong with the church?" "I don't know yet." Ace opened her eyes. The church was old adobe, the kind of Spanish colonial architecture that had been in the Southwest for centuries. The dome was painted faded turquoise and someone had put fresh flowers in the entrance niche. Which meant people still used it. Which meant it wasn't abandoned even though it looked abandoned. "But she prays there. The woman raising the dead. She prays there." Shammy leaned forward from the back seat. She had her window open too, and her hair was already beginning to lift slightly, static electricity gathering. "The air is wrong here. Not dangerous-wrong. Just... full. Like someone's been cooking with the windows closed for years and the smell has soaked into everything." "That's grief," Ace said. She knew it the way she knew things, without explanation, without process. "Old grief. The town is grieving and it doesn't know what it's grieving for." "Grief for seven missing people," Mai said quietly, still looking at her tablet. She'd pulled up the county records. "That's the official number. The actual number is probably higher. People stop reporting things after a while, when the sheriff keeps telling them it's nothing." Ace looked at the sheriff's station. "The sheriff knows." "The sheriff is probably part of it." Mai's voice was flat. Professional. The voice she used when she was being an analyst instead of a person. "There's a Deputy Reyes who's been with the department for fifteen years. His record is..." she scrolled, "...suspiciously clean. No complaints. No incidents. No use-of-force reports. Either he's the most careful deputy in New Mexico or someone's been making those reports disappear." "Or both," Shammy offered. "Or both." Ace got out of the car. The heat hit her like a wall. Not the gradual warming of a spring day but the sudden assault of a place that had spent all morning baking and was now radiating stored energy like a giant red rock. She was 120 cm of compact shadow-pressure, built for enclosed spaces and urban environments, and the open sky of the New Mexico desert felt like it was pressing down on her. "The pressure's dropping," Shammy said, closing her door. "Slow. Not like a storm. Like someone breathing out over a very long time. Whatever's happening here, it's not done yet." Mai grabbed their gear from the trunk. "Let's find this coroner first. Dr. Hector Vega. According to the briefing, he's our local Foundation contact." "Your briefing said the Foundation doesn't have a presence here." "My briefing said no Foundation *station* here. It didn't say no *contacts*." Mai held up her tablet. "Vega's been filing paperwork through anonymous channels for two years. Someone on the fourteenth floor has been receiving it and deciding not to act. We're the first Foundation personnel to physically arrive." "So he's been waiting for us," Ace said. "He's been waiting for *someone*. I don't know if he was hoping it would be us specifically, but he's been documenting anomalies in this town for years, and now someone's finally listening. That has to mean something." It meant something. It meant that Dr. Hector Vega had been watching his town die one disappearance at a time and had spent two years trying to get the Foundation to care. It meant that whatever was happening in Santero was bad enough that even a man who'd probably had to sign NDAs about the existence of the Foundation was willing to risk everything to make contact. --- The diner was called Rosa's, after the name on the sign. It smelled like coffee and something frying and the particular combination of old wood and old smoke that came from buildings that had been standing since before air conditioning. Inside, three people looked up from their breakfast when the bell rang. They were the only customers. The waitress behind the counter had gray hair and tired eyes and the kind of professional smile that was designed to communicate *you're not from here* without saying it. "Three coffees," Mai said. "Black for me. Whatever they want for the tall one." "Coffee's fine," Shammy said. She was scanning the room. Not obviously, but Ace could tell. Shammy always read rooms when she entered them, and this room was telling her things. "And whatever's making that smell. I'm starving." The waitress's eyes lingered on Shammy for a moment. On her height. On her hair. On the way the light caught her eyes in a way that wasn't quite natural. But she wrote down the order without comment and moved to the coffee machine. Mai slid into a booth. Ace sat next to her, leaving room for Shammy. The vinyl seats were cracked and patched with duct tape in several places. The table had water stains that suggested the roof leaked. On the wall, there was a photograph. Ace looked at it. Seven faces, mounted in a cheap frame next to a handwritten sign that read: MISSING IN SANTERO. HAVE YOU SEEN THEM? Seven faces. Three women. Four men. Ages ranging from 14 to 67. Ace counted the faces. Then she counted them again. Three of them she could feel. Still here. Still close. Not alive. She knew what alive felt like, and this wasn't that. This was resonance. The echo of something that had been alive and wasn't anymore but hadn't quite gone where dead things were supposed to go. Three people. Still here. "Who are those people?" Ace asked. Her voice was steady. The waitress paused at the coffee machine. "You don't want to know." "I do want to know. That's why I asked." The waitress brought the coffee over. Her hands were shaking slightly. She set the cups down and looked at the photograph on the wall like looking at it hurt her. "Last ten years," she said quietly. "That's everyone we lost. Sheriff says they're runaway cases, kids who left for Albuquerque and never called, men who went to find work and got lost. But people don't just get lost, you know? Not seven of them. Not from a town this small." "You think something happened to them," Mai said. It wasn't a question. The waitress looked at Mai. Really looked. Taking in the tactical vest under her jacket, the tablet under her arm, the professional stillness that came from years of training. "You're Foundation," she said. Not accusing. Just tired. "Finally." "How did you..." "Been waiting for you for two years. Hector said you might come eventually. That the paperwork would reach someone." She refilled her own coffee cup, which had been sitting mostly full on the counter. "You here about the dead woman walking?" Mai and Ace exchanged a look. Shammy was very still. "What dead woman walking?" Mai asked carefully. "Haven't you read the reports? The bodies that sit up and talk? The voices from the cemetery?" The waitress laughed. No humor in it. "That started three years ago. First it was once a year. Then once a month. Now it's every week. Someone in this town is calling up the dead and asking them questions, and the dead are answering, and everyone acts like that's normal. Like that's just what happens in Santero now." "Do you know who's doing it?" Ace asked. The waitress looked at her. For a long moment she didn't say anything. Then she reached under the counter and pulled out a small laminated card. A photograph of a woman in her fifties, dark hair streaked with gray, wearing black clothing, standing in front of a door that looked like it led to a garden. "Irkal Vasquez-Montoya," the waitress said. "Third-generation curandera. She heals people. That's what she was trained to do. Herbs and prayers and hands-on work with the sick." She put the card down on the table. "Her daughter was the first one. Seven years ago. Celeste. Fourteen years old. She went to the store for milk and never came home." The waitress's eyes were bright with something that wasn't quite tears. "They found her body six months later, three miles from town. Sheriff said she fell off the highway. Sheriff said a lot of things." She picked up her coffee cup. "You want to know who's raising the dead? She is. Because her daughter is one of them. Because she couldn't save her alive, so she's saving her in the only way she knows how." The waitress walked away. Ace looked at the photograph on the wall. Seven faces. One of them was a girl with dark hair and her mother's eyes. And three of them were still here. Still close. Still waiting. Ace's hand went to her chest. Violet was stirring again. Not the full activation, not the pressure that meant danger, but the slow simmer that meant *pay attention*. The woman raising the dead wasn't random. She was methodical. She was working through a list. Three people still here. Three people who hadn't been found yet. "Shammy," Ace said quietly. "Can you read the air in this town?" Shammy had been very still since the waitress mentioned Irkal. Now she moved. Shifted in her seat, tilted her head like she was listening to something far away. The static in her hair increased slightly. "There's a pattern," she said slowly. "Like... like someone's drawn lines between points. The church is one point. The sheriff's station is another. There's a house..." she paused, "...east of here, about half a mile. That's the hottest point. That's where the most recent death happened." "The three still here," Ace said. "Yeah. They're all connected to the same place." Shammy's eyes were unfocused. "It's like a circuit. Someone built a circuit with the dead." Mai was taking notes. "We need to talk to Dr. Vega. And we need to talk to Irkal." "We need to talk to Irkal," Ace agreed. Her hand was still on her chest. Violet was getting warmer. "But not yet. First we need to understand what she's doing. And why." Shammy came back to herself. She looked at the photograph on the wall, at the seven faces, at the one face that belonged to a fourteen-year-old girl who'd been dead for seven years and was apparently still being dead. "She just wants to know who killed her daughter," Shammy said quietly. "That's all. She just wants to know." Ace nodded. The church was calling to her. The church was loud. But the house. The house that was the hottest point. The house was louder. "The daughter's there," she said. "The girl's still there. Irkal's been keeping her close." They finished their coffee in silence. When they left, the waitress was watching them through the window. The seven faces on the wall watched too. Three of them still here. Three of them still waiting. Ace walked back to the car and looked east, toward the point on Shammy's circuit that burned brightest. Something was waiting for her there. She didn't know yet whether she was going to answer. --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter1|← Chapter 1]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter3|Chapter 3 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter2|← Chapter 2]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter4|Chapter 4 →]] --- # Chapter 3: The First Witness **POV:** Mai **Word Count Target:** 4,300 --- Dr. Hector Vega's morgue smelled like formaldehyde and something else. Something organic and old, the kind of smell that got into the walls of buildings where bodies were stored and never quite washed out. Mai had been in dozens of Foundation morgue facilities. They all smelled the same. Death, even when you controlled it, even when you processed it through proper channels, left a signature. This morgue's signature was wrong. Not wrong like contamination. Wrong like someone had been processing bodies here that weren't supposed to be processed. Wrong like there was a second layer of death underneath the formalin and the antiseptic, something that hadn't been authorized or documented or accounted for in any way that would make a Foundation inspector happy. "Dr. Vega," Mai said, showing her credentials. "MTF Theta-9. We're here about the reports you filed." Vega was a small man in his sixties, with gray hair and tired eyes and the kind of professional composure that came from years of working in a job where you saw things you couldn't explain. He looked at their credentials, then at their faces, then at the three of them together. The short one with the katanas. The medium one with the equipment. The tall one with the static-puffed hair. Something in his expression settled. "I was wondering when you'd come," he said. "Sit down. I'll make coffee." "I don't want coffee," Ace said. "I want to see the morgue." "The morgue is..." Vega stopped. Looked at Ace. "The morgue is having a difficult day. I don't think you should go in there right now." "What's happening in there?" Vega's hands were steady as he poured coffee from a thermos into three mismatched cups, but his voice wasn't. "We received a body three days ago. Male, thirty-four, name of Daniel Acosta. Found in an irrigation ditch outside town. Sheriff's department ruled it accidental drowning, but the body..." He paused. "The body has been difficult to keep down." Mai felt the cold certainty of dread settle in her stomach. "Define 'difficult to keep down.'" "I put him in the cooler three days ago. He was dead. I confirmed death through standard indicators. No pulse, no respiration, no neural activity. He was dead." Vega pushed a cup toward Mai. "This morning, he sat up." Ace's hand went to her katanas. "How long ago?" "Six hours ago. He was in the cooler for three days. He shouldn't have been able to do anything. He was *dead*." Vega's voice was rising slightly. "But he sat up, and he opened his eyes, and he looked at me, and he said, 'She didn't fall. He pushed her.'" Mai and Ace exchanged a look. Shammy was very still. "He's still in there?" "Yes. I don't know how. I sealed the cooler. I ran containment protocols. I don't know what else to do." Vega was fully unprofessional now, his composure cracking. "I called the sheriff's department and they said it was a prank. I filed a Foundation report and you people sent me an auto-response telling me to stand by. So I did what I could. I put him back. I sealed the cooler again. And I've been sitting in my office hoping he doesn't..." The temperature in the building dropped six degrees. Not gradually. Not because of the air conditioning. One moment the morgue was warm and stale and too full of death-scent. The next moment the air was cold, so cold that Mai could see her breath, and the cold was coming from the cooler door. Ace drew her katanas. The blades hummed at a higher pitch than Mai had ever heard, almost beyond conscious hearing. Ace's eyes were fully violet. "She's here," Ace said. The cooler door opened. --- Mai would later write the official report using language that would satisfy Foundation bureaucratic requirements. *Containment breach, partial necromantic manifestation, raised subject ambulatory and cooperative.* What she would not put in the report was the way her heart stopped when the door opened. Or the way Daniel Acosta's eyes were milky and wrong and completely aware at the same time. Or the way he looked at them like he had been waiting. He was wearing the clothes he'd been found in. Jeans, a work shirt, boots. His skin was gray and papery, the skin of someone who had been dead for days. But he was sitting up, and he was looking at them, and when he spoke, his voice was clear. "You came," he said. "I wasn't sure you would." "Who sent you?" Ace's voice was flat. Controlled. The voice she used when she was processing a situation and hadn't decided yet whether violence was necessary. "No one sent me." Daniel's eyes moved to Ace, and something in his expression shifted. Recognition, maybe. Or awareness of what she was carrying. "You feel it too, don't you? The weight of them. All of them." Ace didn't answer. Daniel looked at Mai. "You're the smart one. You think in systems. You think if you can map the system, you can control it." He smiled, and the smile was wrong on his dead face. Too human for the rest of him. "You can't control this. She didn't come to control. She came to ask questions. And I'm the answer." "Who pushed you?" Mai asked. The words came out automatically. Analyst reflex. The need to establish facts before emotions. "Who killed you?" "Reyes." The name came out flat and final. "Deputy Reyes. Sheriff's department. He's been killing people in this town for ten years. He pushed me into that ditch because I saw what they were doing. Because I saw what they buried." "What did they bury?" "Toxic waste." Daniel's voice was rising, gaining strength in a way that dead bodies weren't supposed to. "Corpo trucks, coming through at night, dumping drums into holes they dug on reservation land. Reyes got paid to look the other way. Got paid more to make sure anyone who found out disappeared. I'm not the first. I'm not the seventh. I'm just the one who talked." Shammy had moved to the other side of the room. Her hair was sparking slightly, small static discharges she couldn't control. "He's not lying. I can feel it. The room believes him." "The room isn't evidence," Mai said, but she was already taking notes. "Daniel. Can you tell us where the burial site is?" "I don't know exactly. I know where they brought the trucks. There's a turnoff, maybe five miles east, a road that goes to old mining land. They used the shafts. That's where they dumped the drums." He paused. "But you have to understand. I wasn't the one who found the site. I was just the one who followed the truck to see where it was going. Reyes caught me before I could tell anyone." "And Irkal?" Mai asked. "The woman raising you. How did she find you?" Daniel's dead eyes softened. "She comes to the cemetery. Every week. She brings candles and flowers and she talks to the ground like the people buried there can hear her. She talks to her daughter. She talks to all of us." He looked at his hands. Gray. Still. Wrong. "I don't know how she does it. I don't know what it costs her. But three days ago she came to my grave and she put her hands on the earth and she said, 'I need you to speak.' And I woke up." "That's not..." Mai stopped. She had been about to say *not how necromancy works*, but that was Foundation orthodoxy, and Foundation orthodoxy had declined five separate opportunities to investigate this town. "How long can you stay?" "I don't know. The other times... the other raised ones... they lasted maybe an hour. Then they went back." He looked at Ace again. "But you're still here. You're still listening. So maybe this time is different." The temperature in the room dropped another three degrees. Ace was staring at Daniel with an expression Mai couldn't read. The katanas were still drawn, still humming, but Ace hadn't moved toward him. Hadn't attacked. She was just standing there, vibrating at a frequency Mai had learned to associate with Violet being very, very interested. "Ace," Mai said quietly. "Talk to me." "She did this for us," Ace said. Her voice was strange. Distant, almost reverent. "All of us. She called him up so he could tell us what Reyes did. So we could stop Reyes. She's not raising an army. She's raising witnesses." "That's..." Mai stopped. The tactical part of her brain was running calculations, trying to fit this behavior into a profile, and failing. Necromancers were supposed to raise undead servants. Necromancers were supposed to build power. Irkal was raising dead people so they could testify in cases the Foundation had refused to investigate. This wasn't necromancy. This was something else. "Can you take us to Reyes?" Ace asked Daniel. "Can you identify him?" "I can do better than that." Daniel stood up. The movement was wrong. Too smooth, like a puppet on strings. But he was upright, and he was walking, and he was heading toward the cooler door. "I can show you where he lives. I can show you where he keeps the evidence. And I can tell you the names of the others. The ones who've been buried, the ones who can still be found." He paused at the door. "But you have to understand. Once you know, you can't unknow. And once Reyes knows you're coming, he'll run. Or he'll make you disappear." "We can handle Reyes," Mai said. Daniel looked at her with something that might have been pity. "You've never met Reyes. He's not just a man. He's a system. And systems don't go down easy." He walked out of the morgue. The temperature started to rise. Ace followed him without hesitation. Mai grabbed her equipment and went after her. Shammy brought up the rear, her eyes on Ace's back, her hands sparking with barely contained static. Outside, the sun was setting over the desert. Daniel was standing in the parking lot, facing east, toward the town. "She's watching," he said. "Irkal. She's always watching now. She knows you're here. She knows you've heard me." He turned to look at Ace. "She wants you to know something. She says: 'I didn't do this for power. I did this because no one would listen.'" Ace nodded slowly. Then Daniel closed his eyes, and the color drained out of his face completely, and he fell. Mai caught him before he hit the ground. He was heavy. Heavier than he should have been, heavier than a dead man should have been. But she got him down safely, got him flat on the asphalt, and checked his pulse. Nothing. No pulse. No respiration. No neural activity. He was dead again. Really dead this time. Whatever had animated him for those few hours was gone, and the body was just a body. "Damn it," Mai said. She pulled out her comm unit. "I'm calling this in. Foundation needs to..." "No." Ace's voice was quiet. Final. "Not yet." "Excuse me?" Ace was standing over Daniel's body, looking down at him. Her eyes were fading from violet back to their normal color. "She gave us a gift. She gave us his testimony. If we call Foundation now, this becomes evidence in a containment case, not a criminal case. Reyes becomes an anomalous asset instead of a murderer." "He's both," Mai said. "He's obviously both. But if we don't report this..." "If we report this, Foundation takes jurisdiction. Foundation locks it down. Foundation does what Foundation always does. Classifies everything, silences the witnesses, protects the institution." Ace looked up. Her eyes were clear now. Certain. "She's trying to tell us something. She's trying to tell us that Reyes is connected to the burial site, to the consortium that's dumping toxic waste, to everything. And she wants us to stop him before Foundation can bury it again." Shammy was standing very still. "The air is changing. Something is..." She tilted her head. "She's pleased. Irkal. She's pleased with what we did. With what he did." "She gave him a voice," Ace said. "That's all she wanted. For all of them to have voices. So someone would finally listen." Mai looked at Daniel's body on the asphalt. At the town of Santero spreading out around them. At the church with the blue dome on the hill, where Irkal was apparently watching everything and saying nothing. She thought about the five declined reports. She thought about the Foundation's institutional preference for containment over justice. She thought about a woman who'd lost her daughter and decided to break the rules rather than accept that no one would help her. "Okay," Mai said quietly. "We don't call Foundation yet. But we do this by the book. Non-Foundation channels only. We document everything. And when we have enough evidence to bury Reyes and his consortium, we bring in federal prosecutors, not Foundation." Ace nodded. Shammy said, "The waitress at Rosa's was right. Irkal is a healer. She's just using a different method." They stood in the parking lot as the sun finished setting. Somewhere in town, Deputy Reyes was living his life like he always had. Somewhere, Irkal was watching. And somewhere, the dead were waiting. Mai pulled out her notebook and started writing. She had a lot of documentation to do. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,200* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter2|← Chapter 2]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter4|Chapter 4 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter3|← Chapter 3]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter5|Chapter 5 →]] --- # Chapter 4: Resonance **POV:** Ace **Word Count Target:** 4,200 --- Ace woke at 2 AM with Violet stirring. Not the slow simmer of attention. This was different. This was the fragment pressing against the inside of her ribs like something trying to get out. Like something that had caught a scent and couldn't let go. She lay in the borrowed bed and felt it. The pull. East, slightly north. The same direction as the house Shammy had identified as the hottest point on Irkal's circuit. The same direction as the church with the blue dome. The same direction as something that had been dead for seven years and was still dead but wasn't gone. Ace got up. Mai was asleep in the other bed. Actually asleep, not the light doze she usually maintained on deployment. She must have been more tired than she looked. Shammy was on a mattress on the floor, her breathing slow and even, her hair still carrying a faint static charge even in sleep. The air in the room felt thick. Charged. Like the moment before lightning strikes. Ace pulled on her boots. Strapped on the katanas. Checked that Mai's disruptor was where she'd left it. Fully charged, safety on. She didn't take it. She didn't know why, but she didn't take it. She let herself out the back door. The desert at night was a different country from the desert in daylight. The heat had drained out of the rocks and the sand, leaving cold that came from the sky rather than the ground. Stars spread overhead in a way they never did in cities, in a way that made Ace feel small in the way that only vast emptiness could. And underneath the stars, the pull. She followed it. --- The church was maybe half a mile from the house they'd borrowed. Ace moved through the darkness at a pace just shy of running, her body eating distance the way it always did when Violet was active. Smoothly. Efficiently. Without the wasted motion of someone who hadn't spent their whole life learning how to move through spaces that weren't designed for her. The church's blue dome glowed faintly in the starlight. Old adobe, old wood, old prayers soaked into the walls. Ace could feel the death resonance building as she approached. Not the layered old grief of the town, but something sharper. Something focused. Someone was working. She found the door standing open. The interior was dark except for candles. Dozens of candles, placed at the corners and the altar and in a pattern on the floor that Ace didn't recognize but Violet did. The pattern hummed at a frequency that made Ace's teeth ache. And in the center of the pattern, Irkal. She was smaller than Ace expected. 162 cm, maybe, if that. Slightly taller than Ace but so thin she looked fragile. Her hair was dark with gray streaks, pulled back from a face that had been weathered by sun and grief into something that looked older than her years. She was kneeling, her hands pressed flat against the floor, and she was speaking in a language Ace didn't recognize. No. Not a language she didn't recognize. A language she did. A language Violet knew. *Old Tongue. The language of things that had been neverborn and never-alive and had existed before the current rules of the world had been written.* Ace's hand went to her chest. Violet was pressing so hard now that it hurt. "I know you're there," Irkal said. She didn't look up. "I felt you when you crossed the town line. I've been feeling you since." Ace didn't move. "How?" "Because you're carrying something that was never alive." Irkal's voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. The voice of someone who had spent years talking to things that normal people couldn't see. "A fragment. A resonance. A piece of something that died before it ever lived. It's beautiful, what you're carrying. And it's hungry." Ace's katanas were still on her back. She hadn't drawn them. She wasn't sure why. "You're the one raising the dead." "I'm the one asking questions." Irkal finally looked up. Her eyes were dark and tired and full of something that Ace recognized because she'd seen it in mirrors. "My daughter was murdered seven years ago. The sheriff said she fell. The sheriff was lying. I've spent seven years trying to prove it, and the only way I could prove it was to ask the dead what happened." "And they told you." "The dead always tell the truth. That's the cruelty of it." Irkal stood up slowly. She was wearing black. Curandera black, the clothing of a healing tradition that reached back before the Spanish arrived. Her hands were stained with something that looked like ash. "The dead don't have reasons to lie. They don't have reputations to protect. They just remember." Ace took a step forward. Then another. The candles flickered as she passed them, and the pattern on the floor seemed to shift. To reach toward her, almost. Violet hummed louder. "She was fourteen," Ace said. "The daughter." "Celeste." Irkal said the name like a prayer. "Fourteen years old. She went to the store for milk and never came home. They found her body six months later, three miles from town. The sheriff said she fell off the highway. The sheriff was lying." She paused. "Deputy Reyes killed her because she saw something she shouldn't have. She saw where his friends were burying toxic waste. She saw the trucks, the drums, the graves. She was fourteen and she tried to do the right thing and Reyes put her in the ground." "Why are you telling me this?" Irkal looked at her. Really looked, in a way that made Ace feel like she was being seen through rather than looked at. "Because you've been in the ground too. Because you've carried guilt for so long that it's become part of you. Because you're standing in my church at two in the morning following a pull you don't understand, and I know what that feels like. To be pulled by something you can't name toward something you can't escape." Ace's hand went to her chest again. Violet was very still now. Listening. "The fragment," Ace said. "You know what it is." "I know what it isn't. It isn't alive. It isn't a passenger. It isn't controlling you." Irkal walked toward her, slowly, carefully, like approaching a wounded animal. "It's a resonance. A memory. Something that died before it ever lived, and the memory of it stuck to you because you were in the same place at the same time. It attached to your grief. It grew with your guilt. It's part of you now." "How do I get rid of it?" "You don't." Irkal was close now. Close enough to touch. Her eyes were the eyes of someone who had seen too much and decided to keep seeing anyway. "And you shouldn't want to. It's kept you alive. It's kept you sharp. It's the only thing that's ever made you feel like you're not completely alone in your own head." Ace's throat was tight. "You don't know what it does." "I know exactly what it does. I've seen it in others." Irkal reached out. Slowly, giving Ace time to pull away. And put her hand on Ace's shoulder. Her hand was warm. Calloused. The hand of a healer. "When the guilt gets too heavy, it takes over. When you feel responsible for something you couldn't control, it comes forward. It's not trying to hurt you. It's trying to protect you. It's just not very good at knowing when protection becomes destruction." Ace wanted to pull away. She didn't. Behind Irkal, the pattern on the floor was glowing. A new figure was forming at its center. Not fully solid, not fully present, but there. A girl. Young. Dark hair. Her mother's eyes. Celeste. Ace's vision blurred. She blinked, and the blur resolved into tears she hadn't decided to shed. "She looks like her," Ace said. Her voice was wrong. Too many words again. "She looks like she could be..." "She's not," Irkal said. "But she could have been. You could have been. Everyone who dies too young could have been someone else's child, someone else's friend, someone else's..." She stopped. Took a breath. "She's not fully here. I can't bring her all the way. She's been dead too long, and what I did to call her back broke something. She's here, but she's not whole. She screams sometimes. In the dark. She doesn't remember what happened to her." Ace watched the ghostly figure of Celeste shift in the candlelight. Watched her mouth open and close, like she was trying to speak but couldn't find the words. Or like she had too many words and couldn't organize them. "Can you fix her?" Ace asked. "No." Irkal's voice cracked on the word. "I've tried. I've spent seven years trying. I can call her back, but I can't make her remember. I can ask her questions, but I can't make her answer. She's trapped between being dead and being alive, and I did that to her. I wanted her to have justice so badly that I..." She stopped. "I became something she might not recognize." Ace looked at the fragment of Celeste. At the way she flickered at the edges, like something being viewed through damaged glass. At the way Irkal's hand was still on her shoulder, steady and warm. "You didn't become anything," Ace said quietly. "You became what you had to become. There's no other option when the system fails." "Is that what happened to you?" Ace thought about the village. The fire. The Blood-Moon Rift Event that had destroyed everything she'd known and left her with a fragment of something that had never lived and a guilt she couldn't name. She thought about Foundation teams that had found her in the rubble and told her she was special. She thought about Dr. Bright, who had looked at her like she was a problem to be contained rather than a person to be helped. She thought about Mai, who had seen her at her worst and stayed anyway. She thought about Shammy, who had called her the blade and meant it as a compliment. She thought about Violet, which was not a passenger and not a parasite and not a friend but was somehow the closest thing she had to company in her own head. "Yeah," she said. "Something like that." The candles flickered. The pattern on the floor began to fade. Celeste's ghostly form started to dissolve at the edges, sliding back into whatever between-place she'd been pulled from. "Mama," Celeste said. Or whispered. Or somehow communicated in a way that didn't require sound. "Mama, it hurts." Irkal closed her eyes. "I know, baby. I know. I'm sorry." Ace watched as the girl faded. Watched as Irkal's composure cracked and reformed and cracked again. Watched as the fragment of Violet settled back into something that felt almost peaceful inside her chest. Then she did something she almost never did. She put her arms around Irkal. Irkal stiffened. The reaction of someone who had learned not to accept comfort because comfort meant vulnerability and vulnerability meant risk. Then she collapsed into the embrace, and she was crying, and her body was shaking with the kind of grief that had been held too long and was finally finding release. Ace held her. She didn't say anything. She didn't try to explain or fix or analyze. She just stood in the candlelit church and held a grieving mother while the daughter she couldn't save flickered and faded and disappeared. When it was over, Irkal pulled back. Wiped her face with the back of her hand. Looked at Ace with eyes that were red-rimmed and exhausted and somehow clearer than they'd been before. "You're not here to stop me," she said. "No." "You're not here to kill me." "No." "Then why are you here?" Ace thought about the question. Really thought about it, beyond the mission parameters, beyond the Foundation briefing, beyond the tactical assessments Mai was always running. She thought about what had brought her to this church, to this woman, to this moment. "Because you're the first person I've met who understands what I'm carrying," she said. "And because I think you're doing something that needs to be done. Even if it's wrong. Even if it costs you." "Will you help me?" Ace looked at the fading pattern on the floor. At the candles that were burning down to nothing. At the woman who had broken every rule of nature and civilization to give her murdered daughter a voice. "I'll help you find justice," she said. "I can't promise what comes after." Irkal nodded. It was enough. --- Ace walked back to the borrowed house as the sky began to lighten. Violet was quiet inside her. Not dormant, never dormant, but quiet. Resting. Like it had seen something it recognized and had decided to wait. Inside the house, Mai was awake. Sitting on the edge of her bed, tablet in her lap, reading something. She looked up when Ace came in. "You were gone," she said. Her voice was carefully neutral. "Irkal." "I know. I felt you leave. I didn't follow because..." She stopped. Started again. "Because I thought you needed to go alone." Ace sat down on her own bed. "I met her daughter. The partial raise. She's not whole. She's been broken by what Irkal did to call her back." Mai was quiet for a moment. Then: "Irkal's methods are hurting people. Even the people she's trying to help." "I know." Ace looked at her hands. "But the alternative is Reyes. Reyes is the one who's really hurting people. Irkal's just trying to fix what he broke." "And if fixing what he broke means Irkal becomes something worse?" Ace looked up. "Then I'll stop her. But I don't think she will. I think she just wants Celeste to have justice. And I think..." She paused. "I think I want that too." Mai set down her tablet. "Then we help her. But we do it our way. We document everything. We build a case that can't be buried. And when it's over, we make sure she has a choice about what happens next." Ace nodded. It was enough. Somewhere in Santero, in a church with a blue dome, Irkal was watching the dawn come. And in the ground around her, the dead were waiting. They weren't waiting anymore. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,150* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter3|← Chapter 3]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter5|Chapter 5 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter4|← Chapter 4]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter6|Chapter 6 →]] --- # Chapter 5: Briefing: Theta-9 **POV:** Mai **Word Count Target:** 4,000 --- The secure comm channel opened at 7:43 AM, Mountain Standard Time, which meant it was 10:43 in Foundation Central and someone had stayed up late or gotten up very early to have this conversation. Mai answered from the borrowed house's back porch, where she could watch Ace doing morning stretches in the dirt and Shammy reading the sky like a newspaper. Privacy. Perspective. The ability to terminate the call if what she heard made her angry enough to throw the comm unit. "Mai here. Theta-9 actual. Go ahead, Command." The voice on the other end was Agent Collins, their Foundation liaison. The same Collins who'd been in the briefing room when they'd first assembled. He sounded tired. He sounded like someone who'd been reading reports all night and didn't like what he'd found. "Mai. We've reviewed your preliminary sitrep. Good work on the witness contact. However, we have developments. Irkal Vasquez-Montoya has been formally classified. Keter designation, SCP-[REDACTED]. Termination order is now active." Mai's hand tightened on the comm unit. She'd known this was coming. Known it from the moment she'd read the dispatch at 3 AM, from the moment she'd seen the Keter designation, from the moment she'd realized the Foundation had declined five separate opportunities to investigate this town. But hearing it said aloud. Termination order, active. That was different from knowing it intellectually. "Understood," she said. Her voice was professional. Flat. The voice she used when she was processing something she didn't agree with. "What's the timeline?" "Seventy-two hours from now. O5 has authorized lethal force if she does not submit to containment voluntarily. MTF teams are en route to support. You are primary on the ground. When the teams arrive, Theta-9 will coordinate the containment operation." Mai looked at the morning sky. Clear blue, heat already building, the kind of day that would be unbearable by noon. Somewhere out there, Irkal was waking up in her house, probably checking on the pattern of the ground around her daughter's grave, probably hoping that the triad had listened to Daniel's testimony and was building a case instead of building a kill order. "What's the sitrep on the toxic waste connection?" There was a pause. When Collins came back, his voice was different. Careful. "That information is not within your operational purview." "Deputy Reyes is connected to the burial site. He's been killing witnesses for ten years. If we're terminating Irkal for raising the dead, we're also terminating access to the evidence that could convict Reyes. That seems like relevant operational context." "Mai." Collins's voice was lower now. Quieter. "The sitrep you filed mentioned Daniel Acosta's testimony about a burial site. We have reviewed the testimony. We are treating it as anomalous influence rather than factual evidence." Mai closed her eyes. She had known this would happen. The moment she'd decided to document Daniel's testimony, she'd known the Foundation would find a way to dismiss it. Dead men don't testify. Dead men are confused, traumatized, manipulated by the necromancer who raised them. Dead men don't know what they're saying. That's what the Foundation believed. That's what the Foundation always believed. "Copy that," Mai said. Her voice was still flat. Still professional. "Anything else?" "Yes. There is a secondary concern." Collins paused. "Agent Vasquez-Montoya, Irkal, has been in contact with Ace. We have surveillance indicating a meeting occurred at the Santero mission church approximately four hours ago." Mai's eyes opened. "How are you surveilling the church?" "Drone coverage. Standard protocol for Keter deployments. The meeting was observed but not interrupted." "And you're only telling me this now because..." "Because Ace's psychological profile indicates she may be susceptible to emotional manipulation by persons with anomalous abilities. Given your personal relationship with her, Command wanted you to be aware that she may require... intervention." Mai looked at Ace, still doing stretches in the morning sun. At the way she moved. Fluid, controlled, everything in its right place. At the way she glanced up and caught Mai watching and almost smiled before looking away again. "You want me to spy on my own team," Mai said. "I want you to be aware of potential compromises. Theta-9 operates on trust. If that trust has been compromised..." "It's not." "Mai..." "Agent Collins." Mai's voice was sharp now. Sharp enough that Shammy looked up from the sky. "Ace met with Irkal. They talked. Irkal told her about her daughter, about Reyes, about what really happened in this town. Ace came back and told me everything. There was no manipulation. There was no compromise. There was a conversation between two people carrying grief and trying to figure out what to do with it." Another pause. Longer this time. "The termination order stands," Collins said finally. "Seventy-two hours. I would suggest you use that time wisely." The channel closed. Mai sat on the porch for a long moment, looking at the comm unit in her hand. Seventy-two hours. That's what the Foundation was giving them. Seventy-two hours to either kill a grieving mother or be complicit in ten years of murder staying buried. She pulled out her tablet. Started a new document. **FOUNDATION INACTION SUMMARY — SANTERO, NM** *Year 1: Report filed re: Dolores Vega sighting. Declined. (Officer: unknown)* *Year 2: Two reports of partial necromantic manifestation. Declined — priority queue. (Officer: unknown)* *Year 3: Three missing persons + anomaly report Form 23-B. Declined — resource constraints. (Officer: unknown)* *Year 4: Two confirmed raised witness events. Elevated report filed. Declined — Keter queue overflow. (Officer: unknown)* *Year 5: Coroner requests Foundation assistance. MTF deployed. (Current)* Five declined reports. Five opportunities to contain a situation that had escalated from one ghost walking to a Keter event. Five times the Foundation had decided that Santero wasn't worth their attention, and now they were sending kill orders because the problem had become too visible to ignore. Mai added a footnote: *Note: All officer names redacted from available documentation. Unusual for Foundation records. Someone is protecting the decision chain.* "Mai." Shammy's voice, from behind her. "The sky is doing something weird." Mai looked up. The sky had been clear all morning. But now she could see a line of clouds building on the western horizon. Dark clouds. Storm clouds. In a region that hadn't had rain in weeks. "That's not natural," Mai said. "No." Shammy was frowning. "The pressure system over Santero just shifted. Something is..." She paused, head tilting. "Something is building. Not a storm. Something else. Like the whole valley is holding its breath." Mai stood up. "Get Ace. We need to talk." --- The triad assembled in the borrowed house's tiny kitchen. Ace was still in her morning routine clothes. Loose pants, tank top, no visible weapons except the katanas that were never more than arm's reach away. Mai had her tablet and her coffee. Shammy was vibrating slightly, the way she did when the atmosphere was unstable. "I just got off the horn with Command," Mai said. "Irkal has been classified. Keter designation. Termination order is active. Seventy-two hours." Ace didn't move. "And?" "And Collins told me they've been surveilling the church. They watched you meet with Irkal last night." "That's not..." Ace stopped. "That's not illegal. We didn't have operational restrictions." "They're concerned about emotional manipulation. They think Irkal might have compromised you." Ace's laugh was short and bitter. "They've been declining to investigate this town for five years, and now they're worried I might have feelings about a grieving mother. That's rich." "Here's the thing." Mai pulled up her tablet. "I've been looking at the five prior reports. Every single one has the decision-making officer's name redacted. That's not standard Foundation protocol. Foundation protocol requires attribution on all decision records. Which means someone went back and removed those names after the fact." Shammy was frowning. "Why would someone do that?" "Because the officer who declined the first report is probably the same officer who declined the second, and the third, and so on. And that officer might be someone whose career would be damaged by this becoming public." Mai paused. "Or that officer might be connected to Reyes. Or connected to the consortium that's been dumping waste." Ace's hand went to her chest. To Violet. "Irkal mentioned the burial site. She mentioned Consortium trucks. If Reyes is connected to the consortium, and the Foundation has someone protecting him..." "Then Foundation isn't coming to help. They're coming to bury this. Like they've been burying everything else." Mai closed the tablet. "We have seventy-two hours. The question is what we do with them." Shammy was looking at the window. The storm clouds were still building on the horizon. "The air is..." She struggled for words. "The air is angry. Not at us. At something else. It's like the whole valley is angry and it doesn't know what to do with the feeling." "Irkal," Ace said quietly. "She's the one making the air angry. She's calling the dead, and every call is building pressure. She knows Foundation is coming. She's preparing." "For what?" Ace and Mai looked at each other. The answer was obvious. "For a fight," Mai said. "She's preparing for a fight. And if we follow orders, we're going to be the ones fighting her." The kitchen was very quiet. Then Shammy said, "The waitress at Rosa's. She said Irkal started raising the dead because her daughter was murdered and no one would help. What if we could help? What if we could give her the evidence she needs without her having to keep breaking the rules?" "The evidence is in the burial site," Mai said. "We'd need Foundation resources to access it. And if we ask Foundation for resources, they'll want to know why." "So we don't ask." Shammy's eyes were bright. "We go to the site ourselves. We document everything. And then we give Irkal what she needs to make Reyes answer for what he did." Ace was shaking her head slowly. "If we do that, we're actively defying orders. We'd be rogue agents." "We'd be rogue agents who did the right thing," Mai said. "There's a difference." "Is there?" Ace looked at her. "In the Foundation's eyes, there's no difference. We'd be burned. All three of us. Careers over." "Mai's career is analyzing things," Shammy said. "You and I don't have careers. We have assignments. The moment Foundation decides we're compromised, we have nothing." Ace was quiet for a long time. The storm clouds on the horizon were getting darker. Finally, she said: "She lost her daughter. She tried to work within the system and the system told her no five times. She did the only thing she could do. And now Foundation is going to kill her for it." "Yes," Mai said. "That's what's happening." "And if we follow orders?" "Then Irkal dies, Reyes goes free, and the burial site gets classified and forgotten. Like everything else they don't want to deal with." Ace closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were clear. Certain. "Then we don't follow orders. We find the burial site. We document everything. We build a case that federal prosecutors can't ignore. And we give Irkal a choice." "A choice about what?" Ace looked at her. "About whether she keeps raising the dead or whether she lets her daughter rest. About whether she wants to die fighting or whether she wants to live long enough to see Reyes in prison." Mai nodded slowly. "Okay. But we document everything. And we make sure there's a paper trail that leads back to Foundation inaction, so when this goes public, and it will go public, everyone knows why we did what we did." Shammy grinned. "I'd like that. A proper scandal. Foundation hates those." The storm clouds on the horizon were still building. The air in the kitchen felt charged, electric, like the moment before lightning. Somewhere in Santero, Irkal was preparing for a fight she couldn't win alone. Seventy-two hours. Mai pulled out her tablet and started making plans. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~3,900* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter4|← Chapter 4]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter6|Chapter 6 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter5|← Chapter 5]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter7|Chapter 7 →]] --- # Chapter 6: The Daughter **POV:** Shammy **Word Count Target:** 4,300 --- The murder site was different from everything else in Santero. I could feel it the moment we crossed the property line. Not the old grief that saturated the town. Not the layered death that had settled into the soil over years of unsolved disappearances. This was sharper. Something that hadn't finished being violent. "It's here," I said, stopping at the edge of what had once been a field. The grass was dead. Not recently dead, but dead long enough that nothing grew back. The ground itself looked wrong. Discolored. Like something had bled into it. "This is where it happened." Ace was beside me in seconds, her hand on her katana, scanning the perimeter. She didn't ask how I knew. Ace had learned years ago that my body was a weather instrument and the weather was telling me things no one else could hear. Mai was already taking readings with her spectral kit. "The necromantic residue is concentrated here. Higher than anywhere else we've tested. Whatever happened at this site, it left a mark." "Not necromantic." I shook my head. I'd been reading atmospheric pressure since I was old enough to understand that the world was made of moving air, and this wasn't that. This was something older. More human. "This is grief. Old grief. The kind that gets into the ground and stays." "Celeste died here," Ace said. Her voice was flat. Certain. "She's been dead for seven years and this place still remembers her." I walked into the field. The dead grass crunched under my feet. Brittle, dry, wrong. The air was heavier here. Not the natural weight of desert heat but something else. Something that pressed down on my shoulders like a hand. I could feel her. Not literally. I wasn't a necromancer, I couldn't raise the dead or communicate with spirits. But I could feel the shape of what had happened. The way the air had moved. The temperature changes. The pressure differential that came from sudden violence in a space that had been quiet. "She was afraid," I said. I didn't know how I knew, but I knew. "She came here and she was afraid but she didn't run. She knew she should run but she couldn't because..." I stopped. The air was showing me now. Showing me the sequence of events. The truck. The drums. The hole in the ground that someone had dug to bury evidence. A girl who had seen too much and couldn't unsee it. A girl who had tried to do the right thing. "She was fourteen," I said. My voice came out strange. Thick. "She was fourteen years old and she found out what they were doing and she tried to tell someone and they killed her for it." Ace was beside me. Her hand found my shoulder. Solid, grounding, the way she always was when my ability was showing me something I didn't want to see. "What else?" she asked quietly. I closed my eyes. The pressure patterns were clearer when I wasn't looking at anything. I could see the shape of the event now. Not the details, but the structure. The people involved. The way the violence had unfolded. "Seven of them." The words came out before I could stop them. "Seven people total. Reyes killed them over ten years. Celeste was the first. She was the one who found out. She was the youngest. The others were witnesses or people who got in the way." "Shammy." Mai's voice, from behind us. "How are you getting this information?" "The air remembers." I opened my eyes. "Not the way Irkal remembers. I'm not calling anyone back. I'm just reading what's already here. The ground holds impressions. Temperature, pressure, the movement of air during significant events. It's all still here. It's like..." I struggled for words. "It's like the sky took a photograph." Ace's hand tightened on my shoulder. "Seven victims. Daniel was one of them. Who are the others?" "People who found out. People who asked questions. People who couldn't be silenced any other way." I turned to look at Mai. "The burial site... it's still active. They haven't stopped dumping. They're still burying evidence. It's been happening for ten years and no one has stopped them because Reyes has been making people disappear." Mai's face had gone pale. "Seven missing persons reported. That's the official number. But if seven people have been killed..." "Seven confirmed. Probably more. Some of them might not have been reported at all." I looked back at the field. At the place where a fourteen-year-old girl had died for knowing too much. "This is the center of it. Everything radiates from here." Ace was looking at the ground. "The photographs. Irkal mentioned photographs. Celeste took photographs of the burial site before she died. Where would she hide them?" "With her mother." Mai was already checking her tablet. "Irkal's home is the most heavily warded location in Santero. If Celeste had evidence she wanted to protect, that's where she'd keep it." "Then we need to get to Irkal's home." Ace started walking. "Tonight." I followed her. Mai followed both of us. The dead field stretched out behind us, holding its secrets in the soil, and the sky above us was the color of a bruise. --- The walk back to town took forty minutes. By the time we reached the edge of Santero proper, the clouds had covered the sun and the temperature had dropped ten degrees. "The storm is early," I said. "It shouldn't come for another three weeks. Monsoon season doesn't officially start until late June." "It's not a normal storm." Ace was looking at the sky. "It's Irkal. She's building pressure. All those raises, all that grief... it's like she's creating a weather system with her emotions." "Can she control it?" "I don't know." Ace's hand was on her chest again. Violet was stirring. I could tell by the way Ace's breathing had changed, the way her shoulders had tensed. "But whatever she's building, it's going to break. And when it does..." "When it does, we're either with her or against her." Mai caught up to us. "I just got a ping on Foundation comms. Reinforcement teams are en route. They'll arrive in..." she checked, "...forty hours. Which means we have forty hours to find the burial site, document everything, and make a decision about what happens to Irkal." Ace shook her head. "The decision's already made. We're with her." "We haven't even found the evidence yet." "The evidence is here. I can feel it." Ace stopped walking. Turned to face both of us. Her eyes were violet-shimmer, but controlled. Violet was present but not overwhelming. "Mai, I know you need data. I know you need proof that can be documented and verified and used in a court of law. But I've been carrying Violet for years, and I know what it feels like when something is true. This is true. Reyes is a murderer. The Foundation has been covering for him. And Irkal is the only person in this whole town who had the courage to do something about it." I stepped closer to Ace. The air between us felt charged. Not the dangerous kind of charged, but the kind that came before a decision was made. "She's connected to you," I said. "Irkal. You feel the same way about the Foundation that she does. About being failed by systems that should have protected you." Ace looked at me. Her eyes were clear. "I do. I've never said it out loud. But I do." Mai was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "The mission briefing said Irkal was a Keter-class threat requiring elimination. But the mission briefing also said the town of Santero had 'no anomalous activity of note' prior to our deployment, which was a lie. Someone on the fourteenth floor has been falsifying reports to cover up their own inaction." "Or they've been threatened," I said. "Reyes is connected to a consortium. Consortia have money. Money talks in Foundation circles too." "Either way, we're not getting clean data from Foundation sources." Mai closed her tablet. "So we do this our way. We find the burial site. We document everything. We give Irkal what she needs to make Reyes answer for his crimes. And then we tell Foundation that Irkal is not a threat. She's a victim who found an unconventional solution to a problem we failed to solve." Ace nodded slowly. "And if Foundation doesn't accept that?" "Then we go rogue." Mai's voice was flat. Matter-of-fact. "I've been documentation-compliant my entire career. I've followed every rule, checked every box, filed every report. And I've watched the Foundation fail people over and over again because the rules were more important than the outcomes." She looked at Ace. "I love you. And I love Shammy. And I'm not going to let this Foundation kill a grieving mother for doing what we should have done years ago." The air between us felt different now. Charged with something other than weather. The three of us stood on the edge of Santero, looking at the clouds that were building in a sky that shouldn't have been stormy, and we made a decision that couldn't be unmade. "Okay," Ace said quietly. "We go rogue. We find the evidence. We give Irkal her chance." "And then?" I asked. Ace looked at me. At Mai. At the town behind us and the field in front of us and the storm that was coming whether they were ready or not. "And then we see what she's willing to sacrifice. And we decide whether we're willing to watch." The first crack of thunder echoed across the valley. The monsoon was coming early. And somewhere in Santero, Irkal was waiting to see what kind of storm we were going to be. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,100* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter5|← Chapter 5]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter7|Chapter 7 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter6|← Chapter 6]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter8|Chapter 8 →]] --- # Chapter 7: Containment Breach **POV:** Ace **Word Count Target:** 4,200 --- The night Irkal raised three witnesses at once, Ace felt it before anyone else did. She was sitting on the porch of the borrowed house, watching the lightning build on the horizon, when the pressure behind her sternum spiked so hard she gasped. Violet wasn't just stirring. Screaming. The fragment inside her had caught a frequency, a resonance, a call loud enough to wake something that had been sleeping since before it was born. Across the desert, three graves opened. --- Mai was already running before the first body sat up. The reports came in simultaneously. Foundation monitors picking up triple necromantic signatures. Dr. Vega calling in a panic from the morgue. The sheriff's department going dark in that way that meant someone had gotten there first. The three raised witnesses were ambulatory, conscious, and walking in the same direction. East. Toward Irkal's house. "Triad, move!" Mai was out the door with her gear, disruptor drawn, tablet strapped to her arm. "Shammy, aerial reconnaissance. Ace, with me." Shammy was already in the air. Not literally flying, but jumping higher than should have been possible, using pressure differentials to carry herself from rooftop to rooftop, her storm-elemental physiology letting her read atmospheric currents like a map. In seconds she was silhouetted against the lightning-filled sky. Ace didn't run. She moved. The difference was subtle but important. Running was effortful, loud, the body protesting the distance. Moving was what Ace did when she needed to cover ground without thinking about it. Her feet barely touched the earth. They reached Irkal's house in four minutes. The three raised witnesses were already there. --- Daniel Acosta was one of them. Ace recognized him from the morgue. The same gray skin. The same wrong-but-aware eyes. He was standing in Irkal's front yard, along with two others: a woman in her fifties, and a man who looked like he'd been dead longer. His edges more faded. His voice probably harder to hear. But they were all here. All three. All talking. The words reached Ace before she did: "Reyes's truck, it was a white truck, he drove it himself" "Eleven drums that night, I counted them because I knew something was wrong" "the coordinates, I wrote them down before he found me, they're in my pocket" They were talking to each other. Comparing notes. Building a case. Irkal stood in her doorway. Wearing black, hands stained with ash, face gray with exhaustion. She had raised three witnesses simultaneously, probably at great cost to herself, and she was standing there like a general who had won a battle she wasn't sure she could afford. "You shouldn't have come," she said. "We didn't come to stop you." Ace walked through the yard, past the raised witnesses, toward Irkal. They didn't react to her passage. Too focused on their testimony, voices overlapping, dead eyes fixed on things that weren't there. "We came to listen." "The Foundation won't listen. The dead can't testify in court. You know this." "We know the rules." Mai had her tablet out, recording everything. Her voice was steady, professional, the one she used when she was being an analyst instead of a person. "We also know that these testimonies are evidence of crimes. And we know that someone in Foundation command has been protecting Reyes for five years. That changes things." Irkal looked at her. Then at Ace. Then at Shammy, who had landed softly in the yard and was standing very still, her eyes on the sky. "You can't stop what's coming," Irkal said. "I know you're Foundation. I know your orders. And I know that tonight, something broke that can't be unbroken." "What broke?" "The containment." Irkal gestured at the three witnesses. "This is bigger than anything I've done before. Raising one person costs me days. Raising three at once." She stopped. Her hand went to her chest. "I don't have much left. But I had to. Because tonight is the night I raise Celeste." The words hung in the air. Ace felt Violet pulse. The fragment inside her recognized something. The weight of what Irkal was planning, the cost she was about to pay. "Not like this," Ace said. "You're not ready. You told me yourself. You've been burning out. A permanent raise" "A permanent raise costs me my life." Irkal's voice was calm. Matter-of-fact. "I know. I've always known. I have five days. Five days from the first witness I raised in this new sequence, before the cost catches up. I've used two of those days already. Tonight, or tomorrow, or the day after, I'll raise Celeste fully. I'll get her testimony. And then" "And then you die." Ace's voice came out harder than she intended. "You die and leave her alone again. That's your plan?" "My only option." Irkal's eyes were bright. "The Foundation won't listen to the living. The courts won't listen to the dead. Reyes is protected by a system I've spent seven years trying to break. The only way Celeste gets justice is if she speaks for herself. And the only way she can speak for herself is if I pay the price." Ace's hand went to her chest. Violet was very still. "I know what it's like to carry guilt," Ace said quietly. "I know what it's like to want to fix something so badly you'd tear yourself apart doing it. But this." She shook her head. "This isn't justice. This is giving up." "This is the only way." Irkal's voice cracked. "You think I want to leave her? You think I want to die? I've spent seven years trying to find another option. There isn't one. Foundation failed. The law failed. The system failed. I am all that's left." The three raised witnesses had stopped talking. They were standing in a row now, watching the confrontation, their dead eyes moving between Ace and Irkal like they were witnessing something important. "Foundation reinforcements are en route," Mai said. Still recording. Voice still steady. "They'll be here in forty hours. When they arrive, they'll kill you, Irkal. They'll contain the witnesses and classify everything and Reyes will go free." "I know." "And you're okay with that?" "No." Irkal laughed. A sound that was more grief than humor. "But it's the hand I've been dealt. I raised three witnesses tonight. I named Reyes. I gave you everything I have. And now." She looked at the sky. The lightning was getting closer. "Now I need to prepare. The permanent raise requires a specific configuration. I need to be ready." "How long do you have?" Ace asked. "If you do this, if you raise Celeste permanently, how long do you have?" "Minutes. Maybe less." Irkal's voice was calm. "The full raise will burn through whatever I have left. I'll give her everything I am. And then I'll be gone." The yard was very quiet. Ace looked at Mai. At Shammy. At the three raised witnesses who had given their testimonies and were waiting now, patient, like they understood what was happening. "We can slow it down," Mai said. Her voice was different now. Softer. Less analyst. "Foundation reinforcements, we can delay them. Create confusion in the chain of command, file paperwork that buys time. Maybe a day. Maybe two." "I can make the storm last," Shammy said quietly. "Call weather that grounds Foundation communications. I can't stop them, but I can slow their coordination." "Why?" Irkal looked at them. "Why would you do this? You're Foundation. Your orders" "Our orders are to contain and eliminate," Ace said. "We've decided that's wrong. We're going to help you. But we need to do it our way." "What way?" Ace looked at the sky. At the lightning. At the storm Irkal had built that was now bearing down on all of them. "We find the burial site," she said. "We document everything. We get federal prosecutors involved, not Foundation. And we give you a choice about how this ends. Whether you raise Celeste and die, or whether we find another way." "There's no other way." "There's always another way." Ace's voice was steady. "You just have to be willing to look for it." Irkal was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: "You remind me of someone. Someone I used to know, before all this. Someone who believed in things." "Did it help?" "No. She died." Ace almost smiled. "Then I guess I have something to live up to." The lightning cracked overhead. The storm was almost there. Somewhere in the distance, Foundation comm channels were lighting up with triple breach alerts. Somewhere in Foundation command, someone was deciding to escalate. And in a house on the edge of Santero, a woman who had nothing left to lose was preparing to give everything away. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,050* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter6|← Chapter 6]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter8|Chapter 8 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter7|← Chapter 7]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter9|Chapter 9 →]] --- # Chapter 8: Reyes **POV:** Mai **Word Count Target:** 4,100 --- The sheriff's department of Santero, New Mexico, was a single-story building with a flag out front and two patrol cars in the lot. It looked like every small-town police station in America. Which was probably the point. You didn't notice it. You didn't question it. You didn't look too closely at the man who ran it. Mai noticed. Mai always noticed. She approached at 6:47 AM, wearing clothes she'd bought from the local thrift store. Denim jacket, work boots, the kind of outfit that said "outsider" without saying "threat." Her tablet was in a backpack, disguised as a personal item. Her disruptor was back at the borrowed house, because Foundation agents on official business created a different kind of attention than women asking questions. The woman at the front desk was in her fifties. Steel-gray hair and the kind of professional expression that came from years of dealing with people who were having the worst days of their lives. "I'm looking for Deputy Reyes," Mai said. "I'm a journalist. Albuquerque Journal. Doing a piece on rural law enforcement in New Mexico." The woman's expression didn't change, but something in her posture shifted. "Deputy Reyes isn't in today. He's." A pause. Too long. "He's on personal leave." "For how long?" "Couldn't say." Mai smiled. The kind of smile that was supposed to be disarming but probably wasn't. "I see. Well. Maybe you can help me then. I'm looking into the missing persons cases from the past decade. Seven people, I believe. I was hoping someone could give me context." The woman's smile was the same kind Mai had perfected over years of suppressing information she didn't want to share. "That's all in the official reports. Sheriff Henderson can provide those, when he returns from conference." "What conference?" "Law enforcement conference. Albuquerque. He left Monday." It was Wednesday. Mai nodded. Wrote something in her notebook that she didn't need to write. "And Deputy Reyes's personal leave. Did that start Monday too?" "Couldn't say." "But it's a coincidence. That Deputy Reyes and Sheriff Henderson both left town at the same time, during what I'm sure is a busy period of missing persons investigations." The woman's smile didn't waver. Her eyes did. Just slightly. Just enough. "Ma'am, I really think you should speak with Sheriff Henderson when he returns. I'm not authorized to discuss ongoing cases." Mai thanked her and left. --- Outside, Ace was waiting by the car. Shammy was somewhere above, on the roof of the abandoned gas station across the street, reading atmospheric patterns Mai couldn't see. "He's leaving," Ace said. "I can feel it. The pressure around him is building toward departure." "He doesn't know we're here yet." Mai checked her tablet. The data she'd pulled from the department's public-facing systems was thin but revealing. Personnel schedules. Patrol logs. Dispatch records. Reyes had filed a vacation request three days ago. Sheriff Henderson had filed a conference registration five days ago. Both set to return next Monday. Except Reyes's truck had been seen heading toward the Albuquerque airport on Tuesday night. "Flight records?" Ace asked. "Working on it." Mai pulled up the airport manifest she'd accessed through Foundation channels. Reyes wasn't on any commercial flights. But there was a charter flight that had departed for Nevada at 11 PM Tuesday. Private. No passenger manifest required for charter under current privacy laws. "He's running," Mai said. "He knows Foundation is here. Getting out before they can question him." "Or before Irkal raises someone who can testify." "Both." Mai closed the tablet. "Either way, we need to move faster. If he gets to Nevada, he'll disappear into whatever hole the consortium has prepared for him. And Irkal's five-day window is collapsing." Ace's eyes did the thing. The violet shimmer that meant Violet was paying attention. "The air here is wrong. Reyes has been in this building every day for years, and the building remembers him. It doesn't like him." "Can you tell where he went?" "No. But Shammy might." Ace looked up at the sky. "Shammy. Report." Shammy's voice came through Ace's comm unit, tinny and distant: "He's been moving toward the east side of town. There's a compound, looks like an old ranch. Reyes has been there. The air is." She paused. "The air is angry. Contaminated. Something happened there that left a mark." "The burial site?" "Maybe. But also." Another pause. "There's a plane. On a private runway behind the ranch. Reyes's truck is there. He's prepping for departure." Mai's blood went cold. "He's not waiting for Monday. He's leaving today." "Today," Ace confirmed. "Which means we have hours. Maybe less." "Then we go now." Mai started toward the car. "We get to the ranch, we document everything, and we make sure Reyes doesn't leave." "And Irkal?" Mai stopped. That was the question, wasn't it. If they intercepted Reyes, they stopped his flight. But Irkal was still in Santero, still preparing for a permanent raise that would cost her life, still operating under a kill order that Foundation would execute the moment reinforcements arrived. "Irkal first," Mai said. "We tell her what we found. We give her the choice." Ace nodded. They got in the car. --- Irkal's house was quiet when they arrived. The wards around the property hummed faintly. Mai's instruments detected a complex pattern of protective magic, layered and old, the kind that came from generations of practice rather than books. Irkal was not an amateur. Irkal was something that had been in her family for a long time. She met them at the door. She looked worse than she had two days ago. Thinner. Grayer. Her hands trembling slightly in a way she couldn't quite hide. "I know," she said, before they could speak. "He's leaving." "How did you" "The dead told me." Irkal stepped aside to let them in. "Daniel. Rosa. The others. They felt what I was feeling. They know Reyes is running. They're angry. They've been angry for years, and now they have a chance to direct it." Ace was scanning the room. "Where are the photographs? Celeste's photographs of the burial site." Irkal hesitated. Then she walked to a shelf above the fireplace and pulled down a wooden box. Inside, seven photographs. Glossy, faded, clearly taken on a phone camera by a fourteen-year-old girl who hadn't known she was documenting evidence. "Daniel Acosta took these after I raised him," Irkal said. "He told me where Celeste had hidden them. She knew someone might come for her, so she hid them in a place no one would think to look." Mai took the photographs. Her hands were steady, but inside she was reeling. These were real. Actual evidence of toxic waste burial, illegal dumping, the crimes Reyes had committed. These were what federal prosecutors needed. "This is enough," Mai said. "This is enough to convict him. Federal prosecutors will" "Will what? Act on testimony from the dead?" Irkal's voice was bitter. "Even if these photographs are admissible, even if Daniel's testimony is recorded and authenticated, Reyes has connections. The consortium has lawyers. Money. People in places that make problems disappear." "Not this time." Mai held up the photographs. "I know how Foundation works. I know how federal law enforcement works. These photographs, combined with Daniel's testimony, combined with the burial site location. This is a RICO case. Conspiracy to commit environmental crimes, conspiracy to murder, obstruction of justice. Reyes isn't just a deputy who killed some people. He's part of a criminal organization." "And when Foundation arrives? When they kill me and classify everything?" Ace stepped forward. "We don't let that happen. We go to federal authorities first. We make this public before Foundation can bury it. We" "You can't." Irkal's voice was quiet. Final. "Foundation has been protecting Reyes for five years. Why do you think they declined five separate reports? Why do you think every officer who filed those reports had their names redacted? Someone in Foundation command is connected to the consortium. Someone high up. Someone who makes problems like Irkal Vasquez-Montoya disappear." The room was very quiet. Mai thought about Collins. About the way he'd been careful, measured, about the way he'd known exactly what to say to make them feel like they were being listened to while actually being maneuvered into position. She thought about the fourteenth floor, where decisions were made about which problems mattered and which problems could wait. She thought about a system that had declined five separate opportunities to investigate a town full of murdered people, and then sent a kill team when the situation became too visible to ignore. "Then we take this to someone outside Foundation," Mai said. "We take this to the press. We make it so public that covering it up becomes impossible." "That takes time." Irkal was looking at Ace. "And time is something I don't have. The raise is accelerating. I raised three witnesses in one night. It cost me more than I planned. I'm burning out faster than I expected. I have." She paused. "I have maybe a day. Maybe less." Ace's hand went to her chest. "You're dying." "Everyone is dying. I'm just dying faster." Irkal's smile was thin. "I've made my peace with it. The only question is whether Celeste gets her voice before I go." Mai looked at the photographs in her hands. At the box where Irkal had kept them, hidden, waiting for someone to believe her. At the woman who had broken every rule of nature to give her daughter justice. "There's a Pueblo settlement thirty miles east," Mai said. "Sovereign land. Foundation has no jurisdiction there. If we can get the photographs to someone who can verify them and get them to federal authorities" "Reyes is attacking the Pueblo." Shammy's voice, from the doorway. She'd arrived without them noticing, the way she sometimes did, moving through pressure differentials like they were hallways. "He's loading trucks right now. Private security. He's not running. He's burning evidence. The burial site. The witnesses. Everything." Ace's eyes went solid violet. "When?" "Today. Within hours. He's not waiting for Foundation to clear him. He's cleaning house." Ace drew her katanas. The blades hummed at a frequency that made the windows rattle. "Then we go now," she said. "We stop Reyes. We protect the evidence. And we make sure Irkal gets her chance to say goodbye." --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,050* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter7|← Chapter 7]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter9|Chapter 9 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter8|← Chapter 8]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter10|Chapter 10 →]] --- # Chapter 9: The Fifth Night **POV:** Ace **Word Count Target:** 4,400 --- The ride to Irkal's house took eleven minutes. Ace counted every second. Mai was driving. Shammy was in the back, her face pressed to the window, reading the atmospheric chaos that was building toward something none of them could name. The photographs were in Mai's backpack, sealed in evidence bags, ready for federal submission if they survived the next few hours. Ace sat in the passenger seat with her katanas across her lap, feeling Violet's presence like a second heartbeat. The fragment was active. Not fully in control, but alert. Aware. Tracking the same frequencies Irkal had been broadcasting since the first witness raised its hand in the morgue. "She's dying," Ace said. The words came out before she'd decided to speak them. "I know." Mai's voice was steady. "The readings I've been getting, her vital signs are deteriorating. Ritual burnout isn't something you recover from. She's been burning herself down for seven years." "How long?" "Days. Maybe hours." Mai glanced at her. "The three-witness raise accelerated everything. She doesn't have five days. She has one. Maybe less." The car was quiet except for the engine and the wind. Ace thought about Irkal in her doorway. Gray and trembling, preparing to die for a voice she couldn't give her daughter any other way. She thought about the photograph on the wall at Rosa's Diner. Seven faces, one of them a fourteen-year-old girl who'd tried to do the right thing and been murdered for it. She thought about the fragment inside her own chest. The piece of something that had died before it was born and had been riding her guilt ever since. She thought about what it would mean to trade your life for someone else's voice. "She should have more time," Ace said finally. "She should have" "She should have had help." Mai's voice was flat. Controlled. The voice she used when she was angriest. "She should have had Foundation investigate five years ago. She should have had local law enforcement take her seriously. She should have had the system work the way it's supposed to work. Instead she got nothing, and she did what anyone would do when the system fails. She built her own." "Her own system killed her." "Her own system gave her daughter a voice." Mai's hands tightened on the wheel. "I'd rather die giving my daughter justice than live knowing I didn't try. Wouldn't you?" Ace didn't answer. But she felt the words land somewhere inside her. In the place where Violet lived. In the place where the guilt had been accumulating for years. Yeah. She would. She absolutely would. --- Irkal's house was quiet when they arrived. The candles that had been burning at the windows were out. The wards that had been humming were silent. The woman who met them at the door was not the woman Ace had met at the church. This Irkal was diminished. Gray-faced. Moving like someone who had forgotten how to use their body. Her eyes were too bright. Fever-bright, the eyes of someone whose systems were shutting down one by one. "You came back," she said. "I wasn't sure you would." "We came back." Ace stepped inside. The air in the house felt different. Thick. Charged. Heavy with the weight of what was about to happen. "We found the photographs. We have everything we need to destroy Reyes." "But you're too late." Irkal smiled. It was a terrible smile. Grief and resignation mixed together. "I'm out of time. The five days you mentioned? Collapsed. When I raised the three witnesses, I burned through reserves I didn't know I had. I'm dying, Agent Ace. I'm dying and there's nothing anyone can do about it." Ace's hand went to her chest. Violet was pulsing now. Not screaming, but present. Attentive. Like the fragment recognized something in Irkal that it recognized in itself. "How long?" "Tonight. Before midnight." Irkal walked to her kitchen table and sat down heavily. "I tried to wait. I tried to give you more time. But the body doesn't negotiate. The body decides, and the body has decided." Mai was already pulling out her equipment. "Let me check. My instruments might" "Your instruments will tell you what I already know." Irkal's voice was calm. Tired. "I'm a curandera. I've been reading bodies my whole life. I know what dying feels like. I've guided others through it. Now I'm going through it myself." Shammy had been standing in the doorway, very still. Now she stepped forward. "The storm is here. I can feel it outside. The pressure you built, all the grief and anger, it's been gathering for days and it's finally ready to break." "That's not a storm." Irkal looked at her. "That's Celeste. When I go, she'll come fully. The permanent raise. I won't be the one performing it. She will. My daughter is going to raise herself, and she's going to tell everyone what happened, and then." Irkal paused. "Then I don't know. Maybe she'll rest. Maybe she'll stay. Maybe she'll tear the world apart looking for Reyes. That's up to her." Ace sat down across from Irkal. The table between them was old wood, scarred with use, probably passed down through generations. On the table was a photograph of Celeste. Young, smiling, alive. "She's beautiful," Ace said. "She was." Irkal's hand brushed the photograph. "She wanted to be a veterinarian. She loved animals. Had three dogs and a cat and she was convinced she was going to save every stray in New Mexico." She laughed softly. "She would have, too. She had that kind of heart." "What happened to her?" "She found out where the trucks were going at night. She followed one. She saw the drums being buried. She took pictures because she thought." Irkal's voice cracked. "She thought if she had evidence, someone would listen. Someone would care. She was fourteen. She didn't understand that some people have power and some people don't, and having evidence doesn't matter if no one believes you." "Reyes found out she was following him." "Reyes found out and he." Irkal stopped. Took a breath. "He put her in the ground like she was nothing. Like she was trash. And then he went home and slept well and woke up the next morning and was a deputy sheriff, because in Santero, Reyes was untouchable." Ace's hand went to her chest again. Violet was very active now. Pressing against her ribs, humming at a frequency that made her teeth ache. The fragment recognized something. The fragment knew. "I lost my village," Ace said. The words came out before she'd decided to speak them. "I was young. I don't remember most of it. But I remember the fire. I remember running. I remember feeling responsible. Like if I'd been faster, or stronger, or better, I could have saved them." Irkal was watching her. "I carried that guilt for years," Ace continued. "And then Foundation found me, and they told me I was special, and they put this." She touched her chest. ".inside me. A fragment of something that had been neverborn. Something that died before it ever lived. And it rode my guilt like a wave. It grew with it. It became part of me." "Violet," Irkal said quietly. "You know about her?" "I know what she is." Irkal's eyes were clear. "I've seen others like her. People who carry pieces of things that were never alive. The Foundation collects them. Uses them. They're called Neverborn fragments, and they're." She paused. "They're a form of grief. A grief that never had a body to belong to." Ace nodded slowly. "She's been with me for years. She takes over when the guilt gets too heavy. When I feel responsible for something I can't control. She." Ace's voice was rough. "She protects me. But she's not very good at knowing when protection becomes destruction." "No. They never are." Irkal reached across the table and put her hand over Ace's. Her hand was cold. Trembling. "You and I are the same, in the end. We both carry things that died before they should have. We both have fragments that grew out of grief. The only difference is that I can let mine go, and you can't." "Can't I?" Ace looked at her. "What if there was a way to." She stopped. The thought was half-formed, dangerous, the kind of thought that could break something that didn't need to be broken. "What if there was a way to give Violet rest? To let her go?" "I don't know." Irkal's hand tightened. "I've never encountered a Neverborn fragment that wanted to leave its host. They're not passengers. They're not parasites. They're something in between. A grief that found a home and doesn't want to leave. Violet isn't hurting you, Ace. She's keeping you company. She's the only thing in your head that understands what it's like to carry guilt that never ends." Ace wanted to pull her hand away. She didn't. "When you raise Celeste tonight," she said, "what happens to you?" "I go where she goes. Or I don't. I don't know." Irkal smiled. The same terrible, resigned smile. "I've spent seven years trying to figure out what happens after death. Talking to the dead, calling them back, asking them what's on the other side. They never agree on anything. Some of them say there's nothing. Some say there's everything. Some say." She paused. "Some say it depends on whether you're ready." "Are you ready?" Irkal was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: "I don't know. I know I'm tired. I know I've been fighting for so long that I don't remember what it felt like before I started. I know." Her voice cracked. "I know I just wanted my daughter back. Even for a minute. Even for a moment. Even if it was going to cost me everything." Ace stood up. Walked to the window. Outside, the sky was dark with clouds that shouldn't have been there, lightning flickering at their edges. "She's waiting," Ace said. "Celeste. She's waiting for you." "I know." Irkal stood up too, slowly, like her body was forgetting how to hold itself. "Are you going to stop me?" Ace turned. "No." "Why not?" "Because you gave me something," Ace said. "You showed me what it looks like to carry grief so heavy you'd tear yourself apart to honor it. And I don't want to honor it. I want to live with it. I want to find a way to carry it without it destroying me." She paused. "I think Violet is part of that. I think she's been part of this whole time. And I think" She stopped. The door opened. Mai came in, tablet in her hand, face pale. Behind her, Shammy, her hair sparking with static. "Reyes is moving," Mai said. "Private security. Six vehicles. He's not running. He's attacking. The burial site. The witnesses. The Pueblo settlement. He's burning everything." Ace's katanas were in her hands before she'd consciously reached for them. The blades hummed. Bright, eager, ready. "How long?" she asked. "Thirty minutes. Maybe less." Mai was already gathering her gear. "We need to move. Now." Ace looked at Irkal. At the woman who was dying, who had minutes left, who had been preparing to give everything away. "Can you wait? Can you hold on long enough for us to stop him?" "I can try." Irkal's voice was thin. "But not long. Minutes. Maybe an hour if I'm lucky." She smiled. "Go. Stop him. I'll be here when you get back." Ace nodded. Turned. Walked out the door. Behind her, Shammy and Mai followed. And behind all of them, the storm that wasn't a storm broke over Santero, and somewhere in the dark, a woman who had nothing left prepared to give everything away. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,250* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter8|← Chapter 8]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter10|Chapter 10 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter9|← Chapter 9]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter11|Chapter 11 →]] --- # Chapter 10: The Reservation **POV:** Shammy **Word Count Target:** 4,200 --- The air changed the moment we crossed the reservation boundary. I'd felt sovereign territory before. There were places in the Southwest where the land itself had been designated as something other than American, and my body always registered the shift like stepping from one room into another. Different pressure. Different humidity. Different rules. But this was different. "Oh," I said, slowing down. "Oh, this is" "What?" Ace was ahead of me, katanas drawn, moving through the desert like the rocks and sand were obstacles she simply refused to acknowledge. Mai was right behind her, tablet in one hand, disruptor in the other. "The air tastes different here." I tried to explain it. Weather was my language, and I was trying to translate something that didn't have a direct equivalent. "Not bad-different. Sacred-different. Like someone has been praying here for so long that the prayers became part of the atmosphere." "Or the ancestors," a voice said from behind a rock formation. I spun. Ace's blades were up before I could blink. And then I saw who had spoken, and I understood. An elder. Pueblo. Old, weathered, her hair white and her eyes sharp. She was flanked by two younger men. Her grandsons, probably, based on the family resemblance. They were carrying rifles, and they were not happy to see us. "We know who you are," the elder said. "Foundation. The woman who raised our dead sent word you might come. We told her we would not allow it." Mai stepped forward carefully. "We're not here to cause trouble. We're here to protect a witness. Tala. She has testimony about what Reyes did to" "We know what Reyes did." The elder's voice was flat. Hard. "We have always known. We also know that the woman who raises the dead is burning herself out, and when she dies, whatever she built will collapse. We do not want pieces of that collapse on our land." "The storm" I started. "The storm is already on our land." The elder looked at me. Really looked, in a way that made me feel like she was seeing more than my body. "You are like her. The storm woman. You carry something that does not belong in human form." "I'm human," I said. "You are mostly human." The elder's expression shifted slightly. Something like respect entered her voice. "But there is something else in you. Something that came from the spaces between pressure systems. Something that should not exist." I wanted to make a joke about it. I usually did when people said things like that to me. But the way she said it, like she was reading my weather report and finding a front I didn't know about, the joke died somewhere between my brain and my mouth. Ace had not lowered her blades. "We need to talk to Tala. She has information that" "Tala is under our protection. She came to us seven months ago, running from the same men who killed the girl. We took her in because we owed a debt to her grandmother. We do not give her to Foundation agents, no matter what story they tell." Mai's voice was careful. Calm. The voice she used when she was trying not to make things worse. "We understand. We respect your sovereignty. But Reyes is attacking tonight. He has private security, six vehicles, and he is heading for the burial site. If he destroys that site" "He will destroy evidence of crimes against us and against the earth." The elder nodded. "We know. We have been watching him for years. We cannot stop him. We are a sovereign people, not an army. But we can protect our own." "Then let us help." I stepped forward. "I know what Reyes is carrying. I can feel it. He has a device. Something that disrupts atmospheric patterns. It was used against me once." The elder looked at me for a long moment. Then she said something in a language I didn't understand, and one of her grandsons lowered his rifle. "Tala will speak to you," she said. "But only to the storm woman. Only to the one who carries something that should not exist." She looked at me. "You understand what it is to be caught between worlds. To be something that should not be but is. That is why she will talk to you." Lucky me. The universe's least comfortable club, and I was the bouncer. --- Tala was younger than I'd expected. Mid-twenties, maybe. She was sitting in a traditional adobe room with a wood stove and walls that had been painted with protective symbols. She looked tired. She looked like someone who had been running for a long time and had finally stopped. "The storm woman," she said when I entered. "They told me about you. They said you are like me." "Like me?" "Caught between." She gestured at the air. "I can feel the weather in my bones. I know when storms are coming before they form. I know when someone is lying by the way the pressure changes when they speak." She smiled sadly. "In my family, we call it the old sight. In Foundation terms, it's probably a Class-C anomalous sensitivity." "I call it being the world's worst weather forecaster," I said. "I'm always right and nobody ever believes me." That got a small laugh out of her. Small, but real. I sat down across from her. "Tala. I need to know what happened. The night Celeste died. Everything you remember." Tala was quiet for a moment. Then she began to speak. "We were together. Celeste and I. We were fourteen. Best friends since we were five. We did everything together. School, chores, sneaking out at night to watch the stars." She paused. "We knew something was wrong with the trucks. They came through town at night, always at night, and they went somewhere east of the reservation. We decided to follow one." "You both followed the truck." "Yes. Celeste had a camera. Her mother's old camera, a good one. She wanted to document everything. She said if we had evidence, someone would listen." Tala laughed bitterly. "We were fourteen. We thought evidence mattered." "What did you see?" "Drums. Hundreds of drums, buried in holes that had been dug with heavy equipment. The trucks were dumping waste. Chemical waste, the kind that smelled like poison. I could taste it in the air, and it made me sick. But Celeste." Her voice shifted. "She was angry. She took photograph after photograph. She was going to show everyone. She was going to make them listen." "What happened?" Tala's face went pale. "Reyes was there. He wasn't supposed to be. The reports said he was at a conference or something, but he was there. He saw us. He." She stopped. Took a breath. "He tried to grab the camera. Celeste ran. I ran. But she was faster. She knew the terrain better. She could run faster than anyone I knew." "But he caught her." "He caught her." Tala's voice was barely a whisper. "I hid in the brush. I watched him. I watched what he did to her. I watched him put her in the ground." Tears were streaming down her face now. "And then he looked for me. I ran. I ran all night and all the next day and when I got back to the reservation, I told my grandmother everything." "Your grandmother" "She went to the tribal council. They filed reports. They tried to get the Foundation to investigate." Tala shook her head. "No one listened. The same way no one listened to Irkal. The same way no one listened to anyone who tried to tell the truth about what was happening in Santero." "How many?" I asked quietly. "How many people did Reyes kill?" "Seven that I know of. Probably more." Tala wiped her eyes. "There was a man who saw the burial site and tried to report it. They found his body in the river. There was a woman who worked at the county office and tried to access the disposal records. She disappeared. Celeste was the youngest." She looked at me. "She was my best friend. She was fourteen. And no one cared." "We care." I reached across and took her hand. "Mai is documenting everything. Ace is going to stop Reyes tonight. And Irkal. Irkal is dying to give Celeste a voice. You are not alone in this." Tala's hand tightened on mine. "Irkal is dying?" "The raise. It costs her. She's burning out. She has hours left." "She asked me to testify." Tala's voice was thick. "She raised one of the victims, someone who saw me with Celeste that night. She asked if I would give my testimony, to complete the picture. To give Celeste justice." "Will you?" Tala was quiet for a long moment. Outside, I could feel the storm building. Not my storm, but Irkal's storm, the one she had created with her grief and her determination. The one bearing down on Santero like an inevitable thing. "I was going to say no," Tala said finally. "I was going to say I couldn't relive it. But if Irkal is dying." She looked at me. "If Irkal is willing to burn herself out for this, the least I can do is give my testimony. I'll talk to your analyst. I'll give you everything I know." "Thank you." "Thank Irkal." Tala stood up. "And when you stop Reyes, if you stop him, tell him something for me. Tell him my grandmother's grandmother was a great warrior. Tell him she once killed a man with her bare hands to protect her village. Tell him we are not as weak as he thinks we are." I nodded. "I'll tell her." When I left the adobe room, Ace and Mai were waiting outside. The grandsons had gone. The elder was standing at the edge of the reservation, looking toward Santero. "He's moving," she said. "The man called Reyes. Six vehicles. Twenty minutes out." Ace's blades hummed. "The burial site?" "The burial site. Yes." The elder turned to look at her. "You cannot stop him alone. You know this." "We have federal evidence now." Mai held up her tablet. "Photographs. Testimony from the raised witnesses. Tala's statement. If we can hold the site until dawn" "Dawn is hours away." The elder shook her head. "Reyes has private security. Professional men with guns. And he has the device that disrupts the air." She looked at me. "The storm woman. He will use it against you." "I know." I'd felt it before. The sterile suppression, the way my abilities could be stripped away by technology designed to tear atmospheric layers apart. "But I have something he doesn't expect." "What?" I smiled. It wasn't a brave smile. It was the kind of smile that came from having two people beside you who would never leave you alone. "I have them." --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,000* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter9|← Chapter 9]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter11|Chapter 11 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter10|← Chapter 10]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter12|Chapter 12 →]] --- # Chapter 11: Blood **POV:** Ace **Word Count Target:** 4,300 --- The burial site was exactly where Daniel had said it would be. An old mining shaft, abandoned decades ago, now surrounded by a chain-link fence and a sign that read HAZARDOUS MATERIALS, NO TRESPASSING. The sign was faded. The fence was rusted. The man standing at the entrance with a rifle was neither faded nor rusted. He looked professional. He looked like someone who had been paid to stand in the middle of nowhere and make sure no one asked questions. There were five others like him. Mai had counted from the ridge where we were positioned, using binoculars that picked up thermal signatures. Six private security contractors. Armed. Positioned around the perimeter. And in the center of it all, a white truck that was currently being loaded with drums by men who looked like they wished they were anywhere else. And Reyes. I could see him. Deputy Samuel Reyes. Tall, broad-shouldered, with the kind of face that looked trustworthy in a photograph and calculating in person. He was directing the loading operation, and every few minutes he checked his phone like he was waiting for confirmation of something. "Comms relay," Mai said quietly. "He's been in contact with someone. Probably the consortium. They're coordinating evidence destruction." "Can you jam it?" "I can try. But the device he has, the atmospheric disruptor, it's interfering with my equipment. If I try to jam comms, I'll probably trigger it." She looked at me. "We need to disable the device first." "Shammy." Shammy was crouched beside us, her hair sparking with barely contained energy. She'd been building charge since we left the reservation. Gathering atmospheric potential like a battery, preparing for something she hadn't fully explained yet. "I can reach it," she said. "The device. It's on the east side of the site, near the main generator. If I can get close enough" "You'll be exposed." Mai's voice was sharp. "The moment you move, they'll see you. And that device" "I know what it does." Shammy's eyes were bright. Not afraid. Focused. "It disrupts my abilities. It tears the atmosphere apart. But it has to be pointed at me to work. If I move fast" "Too risky." I stood up. "I'll draw their attention. Mai, comms and documentation. Shammy, wait for my signal." "Ace." Mai started. "That's an order." I jumped off the ridge. --- The descent was fast. I let gravity do the work, dropping from rock to rock, katanas already drawn, the blades humming at a pitch that meant Violet was fully awake and paying attention. The security contractors saw me coming. Of course they did. I wasn't trying to be quiet. They started shouting, reaching for weapons, forming the kind of response pattern that suggested they'd trained for this. They hadn't trained for me. The first one went down before he could raise his rifle. Not dead. I wasn't trying to kill, I was trying to disable. But the blade caught his shoulder and he went down screaming. The second one got his weapon up but I was already past him, inside his guard, my elbow hitting his solar plexus hard enough to fold him in half. "Contact! Contact!" Three more converging. Reyes was backing toward the truck, phone pressed to his ear, shouting something I couldn't hear. The device operator was spinning toward me, the black box in his hands glowing with a light that made my skin crawl. I charged. The device fired. The world went white. Not light. White. The absence of everything. For a moment I couldn't feel the air, couldn't feel Violet, couldn't feel anything except static and emptiness. The device had created a pocket of atmospheric sterility, a zone where the natural laws of the world had been temporarily suspended. I kept moving anyway. Training took over when thought couldn't. Muscle memory. Reflex. The thousands of hours I'd spent learning to fight in every condition, against every disadvantage. The device was killing my connection to Violet, but my body remembered what to do. The operator went down. Then the next one. Then the next. I was dimly aware of Shammy. She had launched herself from the ridge the moment the device fired, using the chaos as cover, her body a blur of motion and lightning. She hit the generator and the world erupted in sparks. The device stopped working. Violet flooded back. --- Reyes was running. He was heading for the truck, abandoning his men, abandoning the evidence, abandoning everything. I could see it in the way he moved. Fast, desperate, the gait of someone who had always known this day might come and had prepared an escape route. I let him run for thirty feet. Then I caught him. It wasn't graceful. It was fast. The katanas sang through the air and I was behind him, my blade at his throat, my body pressed against his back in a hold that would have been intimate if it weren't also completely incapacitating. "Deputy Reyes," I said. "Samuel Reyes. You're under arrest for the murder of seven people, the illegal dumping of toxic waste, and about fifteen other charges I'm sure Mai will be happy to enumerate." His body was shaking. Not from cold. From the realization that it was over. "You're Foundation," he said. "I called Foundation. They said they were sending a team to" "We are the team." I pressed the blade tighter. "And we're not here to help you." "This is illegal. You don't have jurisdiction" "We're not Foundation." The words came out flat. True. "We're rogue agents who have decided that your crimes are more important than our careers. And we're going to make sure you answer for them." His knees buckled. I caught him. Held him upright by the throat, which was the only way to hold someone who was collapsing while not actually supporting their weight. "Ace." Mai's voice, from somewhere behind me. She was approaching with her disruptor drawn, tablet under her arm, her expression the kind of professional calm that meant she was furious. "Don't kill him." "I wasn't planning to." "You were planning to." I didn't disagree. "But I'm not going to." Mai stopped beside us. Looked at Reyes. Her eyes were flat, cold, the eyes of someone who had read the files and knew exactly what this man had done. "Seven people," she said. "Including a fourteen-year-old girl." Reyes didn't respond. His eyes were fixed on something in the middle distance. Probably the life he wasn't going to get back to. The freedom he wasn't going to have again. The comfortable certainties that had protected him for so long. "Where are the photographs?" Mai asked. "Celeste's photographs. Where did she hide them?" "I don't know what you're talking about." My blade pressed harder. Not enough to cut. Just enough to remind him that the blade was there. "Irkal has them," I said. "She has all seven. She has Daniel Acosta's testimony. She has the burial records. She has everything. The only thing she doesn't have is you." I paused. "And now she does." "Foundation will protect me. I have contacts" "Foundation is the reason we're here." Mai's voice was flat. "Foundation declined to investigate your town five separate times. Foundation redacted the names of every officer who filed reports about you. Foundation was planning to kill Irkal and bury everything you did." She smiled. It wasn't a pleasant smile. "But Foundation doesn't know we're rogue now. And when this goes public, when federal prosecutors see what we've documented, Foundation's protection is going to evaporate like it never existed." Reyes was quiet for a long moment. Then he said: "The girl. Irkal's daughter. She didn't suffer." The blade trembled. "Ace." Mai's voice was careful. "Ace, don't." "You." My voice came out wrong. Too many words. The words were tumbling out and I couldn't stop them. "She was fourteen. She was fourteen years old and she was going to be a veterinarian and she loved animals and you put her in the ground like she was trash. You" Violet surged. I felt it happen. Felt the fragment inside me rise up and take control the way it always did when the guilt got too heavy. My vision went violet, my thoughts went silent, and the body I was riding lurched forward with a violence I hadn't authorized. Reyes screamed. And then Mai was there. Her hand on my wrist, her body pressed against mine, her voice in my ear saying my name over and over like it was a prayer or a command or both. "Ace. Ace. ACE." The violet receded. Slowly. Reluctantly. Like something that didn't want to let go. I was standing over Reyes. My blade was at his throat. I was close enough to smell his fear-sweat, close enough to see the tears in his eyes. "She didn't suffer," Reyes whimpered. "I made it fast. I didn't" "I know you didn't." My voice was steady again. Barely. "That's not the point. The point is you did it at all." Mai's hand was still on my wrist. She wasn't pulling me back. She was anchoring me. Grounding me. Making sure I didn't drift away again. "He's in custody," she said quietly. "We have him. He's ours now. And we're going to make sure he answers for what he did." I nodded. Slowly. The violet faded completely. Violet retreated to wherever she went when I was in control, and I was in control again, and the blade at Reyes's throat was still there but the hand holding it was steady. "Get him up," I said. "We have a lot of evidence to document." Mai did. She hauled Reyes to his feet, zip-tied his hands, marched him toward where Shammy was standing over the remaining contractors with lightning still crackling between her fingers. I stood in the desert, in the shadow of the burial site, and breathed. The storm was still building overhead. Irkal's storm. The one that would break tonight when she finally raised Celeste. And somewhere in Santero, a dying woman was waiting for us to bring her justice. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,200* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter10|← Chapter 10]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter12|Chapter 12 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter11|← Chapter 11]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter13|Chapter 13 →]] --- # Chapter 12: Truth **POV:** Mai **Word Count Target:** 4,100 --- The evidence room at the borrowed house looked like a crime scene itself. Photographs covered one wall. Seven images, glossy, faded, taken by a fourteen-year-old girl who hadn't known she was documenting her own death. Satellite imagery covered another wall, downloaded from Foundation databases: the burial site, the surrounding terrain, the access roads that trucks had been using for a decade. Witness statements filled a third wall, typed and printed and signed by the three raised witnesses who had given their testimonies before returning to the ground. And Reyes was on the fourth wall. Cuffed to a chair. Sitting in the corner of a room that smelled like dust and old grief. "Photographs authenticated," I said, pinning another printout to the evidence board. "Forensic analysis confirms metadata, lighting conditions, and camera model consistent with a phone camera purchased seven years ago. The images show drums buried at three separate coordinates, falsified disposal records, and at least two identifiable consortium executives overseeing operations." Ace was sitting on the bed, watching Reyes. She hadn't spoken since we'd brought him in. Her katanas were cleaned and sheathed, propped against the wall where she could reach them, but her eyes hadn't left the man who had murdered a fourteen-year-old girl and seven other people. Shammy was outside, reading the sky. The storm was still building, but it had settled into something almost peaceful. The way the atmosphere gets before a long rain, when the violence has been exhausted and what's left is just the weight of water waiting to fall. "The federal prosecutors will have everything by morning," I continued. "I've contacted the Environmental Crimes Division through a channel that doesn't go through Foundation. I've sent the evidence to three separate journalists. Two from major outlets, one who specializes in environmental reporting. By the time Foundation realizes what we've done, it will be public." Reyes laughed. A bitter sound. The laugh of someone who had finally understood that the system he'd relied on had failed him. "You think this matters?" he said. "You think some journalists are going to bring down the consortium? They have lawyers. They have connections. They have" "They have me." I turned to face him. "And I have a very long memory." Reyes shut up. Ace finally moved. She stood up, crossed the room, and crouched in front of Reyes so they were eye to eye. Her expression was unreadable. Not the flat calm she used in combat, but something else. Something that looked like grief. "She was fourteen," Ace said quietly. "You killed a fourteen-year-old girl because she saw something she shouldn't have." Reyes didn't respond. "Did you know her? Before? Did you see her in town, playing with her friends, going to school? Did you know who she was?" "I." Reyes stopped. Something shifted in his face. For a moment, he looked almost human. "She was the Vasquez girl. The curandera's daughter. She was bright. Too bright. She asked too many questions." "And that made you afraid." "That made her a problem." Reyes's voice was flat. Reciting facts. "I didn't want to kill her. I didn't want to kill any of them. But they wouldn't stop. They kept asking questions. They kept looking. I didn't have a choice." Ace stood up. "You always have a choice. You just didn't like the other options." She walked out of the room. I followed her. Outside, the storm was so close now that I could feel the charge in the air. The way the molecules were rearranging themselves in anticipation of something that had been building for days. "She's dying," Ace said. "Irkal. The effort of raising three witnesses accelerated everything. She has hours." "We have Reyes. We have the evidence. If we can get this to federal prosecutors" "It won't be enough." Ace's voice was quiet. "She knows she won't live long enough to see the trial. She knows the system is slow. That's not why she did any of this." I knew. I had known since the moment I'd read the first witness report. Since the moment I'd understood what a woman with nothing left to lose could do when the systems that should have protected her had failed. "She wanted Celeste to speak," I said. "She wanted her daughter to have a voice. Even if no one believed her. Even if the trial took years. She wanted to know that Celeste would be heard." "She wanted justice." Ace looked at the sky. "She wanted to know that her daughter's death meant something. That someone would remember." "And now?" Ace was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: "Now she raises Celeste one last time. And then she dies." The air felt heavy. Charged. Ready. "Then we go to her," I said. "We tell her what we've found. We let her make the choice." Ace nodded. We got in the car. --- Irkal's house was dark when we arrived. The candles that had been burning in the windows were out. The wards that had hummed at the property's edge were silent. The woman who met us at the door was barely standing. "You found him," she said. Her voice was a whisper. "I felt it. When Reyes fell. The whole valley felt it." "He's in custody. The evidence is documented. Federal prosecutors have everything they need." I handed her a folder. Copies of everything, organized and annotated. "It won't bring Celeste back. But it will make sure he answers for what he did." Irkal took the folder. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hold it. She looked at the papers inside. At the photographs of her daughter's face. At the testimony that confirmed everything she had known for seven years. "Thank you," she said. "Thank you. I didn't." Her voice broke. "I didn't think anyone would believe me. I didn't think anyone would care." "We care." Ace stepped forward. "We care. And we're sorry it took so long." Irkal looked at her. At the violet shimmer in Ace's eyes. At the weight of grief that Ace carried like a second heartbeat. At the fragment of something that had died before it was born and had been riding Ace's guilt ever since. "We're the same," Irkal said quietly. "You and I. We both carry things that should have died with the people we lost." "Yeah." Ace's voice was rough. "We are." The storm outside cracked. Lightning split the sky. And Irkal began to collapse. Ace caught her. Shammy, who had arrived without us noticing, moving through the pressure differentials like they were doorways, was there a moment later. Her hands on Irkal's shoulders, keeping her upright. "The raise," Irkal gasped. "I have to. I have to do it now. I'm out of time." "We just told you." I started. "I know what you told me." Irkal's eyes were bright with something that wasn't quite fever. "I know Reyes is in custody. I know you have evidence. I know the system will work, eventually, if I give it time." She smiled. It was the smile of someone who had made peace with something and wasn't going to back down. "But I need to hear her voice. I need to hear Celeste speak. And she." Irkal's voice broke. "She's been trapped between being dead and being alive for seven years because I couldn't let her go. I need to set her free." "That will kill you." "I know." Irkal looked at Ace. "That's why I'm asking for your help. Not to stop me. To witness. To make sure Celeste's testimony is recorded. To make sure that when I'm gone, someone knows what happened." Ace was quiet for a long moment. Then she said: "I'll do it." --- The burial site was the same as it had been hours ago, when Reyes had been loading drums into a truck. The fence was still there. The sign was still there. The equipment was still there, abandoned by contractors who had fled when they'd realized their employer was in custody. But the ground was different now. Irkal had walked to the center of the site, to a spot that was unmarked but that she clearly knew by heart. She knelt in the dirt, her black clothing gathering dust, her hands pressed flat against the earth. "Help me up," she said. Ace helped her stand. I started recording. And then Irkal opened her mouth and began to speak in a language that had been old when the Spanish came to New Mexico. A language that existed in the space between living and dead. A language that Violet recognized and responded to. The ground began to move. Not violently. Not like an earthquake or a collapse. Just. Movement. The dirt shifting, the air rippling, the temperature dropping ten degrees in a single breath. And then she was there. Celeste. Not a ghost. Not fully alive. Something in between. A young girl, maybe fourteen, with dark hair and her mother's eyes, standing in the dirt where she had been buried seven years ago. "Mama?" Celeste said. Irkal made a sound that was more grief than word. "I'm here, baby. I'm here." "I'm not." Celeste looked at her hands. At the ground. At the sky. "I'm not supposed to be here. I was sleeping. I was in the dark and I was sleeping and then you called and I" "I know. I know." Irkal was crying. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I should have let you rest. I should have" "No." Celeste's voice was clearer now. Stronger. "No, Mama. I'm glad you called. I'm glad you didn't give up." She looked around the burial site, at the evidence of what had been done to her, at the place where she had died. "I remember now. I remember what happened." Ace stepped forward. "Can you tell us? Can you testify?" Celeste looked at her. At the violet shimmer in her eyes. At the fragment pressed against Ace's chest like a second heartbeat. "You're carrying something that never lived," Celeste said quietly. "Something that died before it was born. You understand." "I understand." "Then I'll tell you." Celeste turned to face the recording device, to face the cameras and the witnesses and the world that had failed to listen for seven years. And then she spoke. She told them everything. The trucks. The drums. The burial site. The men in suits who had watched while the waste was dumped. The way Reyes had smiled when he'd realized she'd seen too much. The fear. The running. The ground opening beneath her. She told them how it felt to die. When she finished, the sky broke open and the rain came. Irkal collapsed. Ace caught her. Held her in the dirt and the rain while the water washed everything clean, while the storm that had been building for days finally released, while the girl who had been dead for seven years looked at her mother and smiled. "Thank you," Irkal whispered. "I love you, Mama." "I love you too." The violet light faded from Celeste's eyes. The rain filled the spaces where her body had been. And Irkal, the woman who had raised the dead, who had broken every rule of nature to give her daughter a voice, closed her eyes and didn't open them again. Ace held her in the rain. And somewhere in the dark, federal prosecutors were waking up to evidence that would change everything. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,100* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter11|← Chapter 11]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter13|Chapter 13 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter12|← Chapter 12]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter14|Chapter 14 →]] --- # Chapter 13: Ultimatum **POV:** Ace **Word Count Target:** 4,200 --- The comm channel opened at 6:47 AM. I knew the time because I'd been sitting at the window since before dawn, watching rain fall on Santero for the first time in weeks. Mai's tablet pinged. Priority notification. She was across the room in seconds, pulling up the channel, face pale in the early light. "Mai." Collins's voice. Tired. Careful. The voice of someone delivering news he didn't want to deliver. "I need you to acknowledge." Mai pressed transmit. "Acknowledged. Go ahead." "The O5 council has reviewed the situation in Santero. Your actions over the past seventy-two hours have been noted." A pause. "You are hereby ordered to surrender Irkal Vasquez-Montoya into Foundation custody for immediate termination. Any personnel assisting her will be designated complicit and subject to the same termination order." Quiet. I looked at Irkal's body on the bed. Twelve hours dead. The rain had stopped sometime before dawn. Mai and Shammy had carried her inside, cleaned her, laid her out like she was sleeping. Peaceful. Finally at rest. "Agent Collins." Mai's voice was steady. The voice she used when she wanted to break something. "Irkal Vasquez-Montoya is deceased. She died at approximately 2130 hours last night, during a ritual conducted with full witness testimony and documentation. Her body is currently in our possession." Silence on the channel. "Say again?" "Irkal is dead. She performed a permanent necromantic raise on her daughter, Celeste, at the burial site you failed to investigate for five years. The raise was successful. Celeste testified. The testimony was recorded and has been submitted to federal prosecutors and three separate media outlets. Irkal died during the ritual, as she knew she would." Mai paused. "The kill order is moot." More silence. Then Collins, different now. Harder. "You submitted evidence to media outlets?" "Yes." "Without Foundation authorization?" "Yes." "Agent Mai. Do you understand what you've done?" Mai looked at me. At Shammy. At the body on the bed, at the photographs on the walls, at the compiled evidence of ten years of murder and corruption that the Foundation had chosen to ignore. "I understand perfectly." Her voice was almost gentle. "I'm just sorry it took me this long." The channel went dead. --- "They'll come for us," Shammy said quietly. She was by the window, watching the sky, reading something in the clouds I couldn't see. "Foundation. Not to help. To contain. They'll want to classify everything." "They'll want to silence us." I stood up. My katanas were still within reach, always within reach, but for the first time in years I didn't feel like reaching for them. "We're loose ends now. Rogue agents with evidence that embarrasses the Foundation." "What do we do?" I looked at Irkal. At the peace on her face. At the rain-washed windows and the morning light and the weight of everything that had led to this. "We have a vote," I said. "The three of us. Unanimous or nothing." Mai and Shammy both looked at me. "What do you want to do?" Mai asked. I thought about it. Past the mission parameters. Past the Foundation training. Past the years of following orders because the alternative was worse. "I want to finish what Irkal started. Make sure Reyes goes to prison. Make sure the consortium faces consequences. Make sure what we did here, the evidence, the testimony, stays public." I paused. "I'm tired of the Foundation deciding which victims matter. Tired of systems that fail people and then punish them for pointing it out." Mai nodded slowly. "What she said." Shammy's hair was sparking. Not the violent sparking of fear. The gentle sparking of emotion she couldn't contain. "I'm with you. Both of you. Whatever comes." Mai looked at us. Then she pulled out her tablet and started typing. "What are you doing?" "Documenting." Her fingers moved across the screen. "The vote. The decision. The reason we did what we did. All in writing. When Foundation comes for us, there's a record. A real one. Not redacted. Not classified." "Collins will use it against us." "Collins will try." Mai smiled. Thin. Sharp. "But he doesn't know everything yet. The five declined reports. The officer whose name was redacted from every decision document. Foundation command has been protecting Reyes for five years." "How do you know that?" "Because I found it." Mai turned the tablet around. An internal Foundation memo, dated three years ago, discussing the Santero situation. The memo recommended "continued non-intervention due to consortium connections at regional level." Signed with a name that had been blacked out, but not thoroughly enough. I could still make out the first letter. "That's high up." "O5-adjacent. Someone on the council or someone who reports directly to them." Mai's voice was flat. "We've been played from the beginning. The Foundation didn't decline to investigate Santero because they didn't care. They declined because someone told them not to." Shammy was reading over Mai's shoulder. "We can use this." "We can use all of it." Mai closed the tablet. "But first, we survive the next few hours. Foundation will send a response team. Probably MTF, probably with termination authorization for all three of us." "Can we stop them?" I looked at Shammy. At the way the air around her was moving, pressure differentials she read like a book. At the storm still settling over the valley after Irkal's final ritual. "We don't need to stop them. Just buy time." "For what?" "This." I pulled out my comm unit. "Dr. Bright. MTF Theta-9 requesting emergency consultation. I know he's probably asleep. Wake him up." --- Dr. Bright arrived in a Foundation helicopter four hours later. He looked exactly like I remembered. Tall, thin, with the kind of face that was impossible to read and eyes that saw too much. He'd been the one to find me in the wreckage of my village, years ago. The one who told me I was special, that Violet was a gift, that I could be useful if I learned to control what I carried. He hadn't been wrong. But he hadn't told me the whole truth either. "Ace." He stood in the doorway, looking at Irkal's body, at the evidence boards, at the three of us, battered, exhausted, standing in documentation of Foundation failure. "You look like hell." "I feel like hell." I stepped forward. "Dr. Bright. I need you to understand something before you say anything." "I'm listening." "Irkal Vasquez-Montoya was not a Keter-class threat. She was a grieving mother who lost her daughter to a murderer protected by a consortium with connections to Foundation command. She spent seven years trying to get the Foundation to investigate. They declined five separate times. And when Irkal finally found a way to give her daughter justice, the only way she had left, the Foundation sent us to kill her." Bright's expression didn't change. "I know." "You know?" "I've read the files. All of them. Including the ones that were supposed to stay redacted." He stepped inside. Looked at Mai. "Good work, Agent Mai. The documentation is thorough." Mai blinked. "You sent us here to—" "I sent you here because I knew you would do exactly what you did. Follow the evidence. Protect the witness. Make the hard call." Bright looked at Irkal's body. "I've been trying to get someone to investigate Santero for five years. Every time I filed a report, someone higher up shot it down. I couldn't act without authorization. But I could send three people I trusted to do the right thing." I was staring at him. "You used us." "I trusted you." Bright's voice was quiet. "There's a difference. I knew what would happen if you found the truth. I knew you would choose justice over protocol. And I was hoping that when you did, there would be enough evidence to bring down the people who've been protecting Reyes." "Collins said there's a termination order." "Collins is an idiot." Bright smiled. Thin. Sharp. "The termination order was never Foundation-wide. It was issued by a single O5 member who has since been relieved of duty. The evidence you submitted to federal prosecutors was enough to trigger an internal investigation. Foundation command is in chaos. The people who protected Reyes are trying to cover their tracks before anyone notices." "What happens to us?" Bright looked at each of us. At Mai with her documentation and her tactical mind. At Shammy with her storm-elemental physiology and her ability to read the sky. At me with my katanas and my Violet fragment. "What do you want to happen?" I thought about the question. About the Foundation career I was never going to have. About the rules I'd broken and the choice I kept making every time I picked up these blades. "Reyes goes to prison. The consortium faces consequences. What Irkal did, what her daughter did, doesn't get erased or classified or buried." "That can be arranged." "And us? Our careers?" Bright was quiet for a moment. Then: "Foundation wants this buried. They want everyone to forget that there was ever a town called Santero, a woman named Irkal, a murder covered up for ten years. They can't bury it now. The evidence is public, federal prosecutors are involved, three journalists are very interested in writing very embarrassing articles about Foundation failures." He paused. "But they can bury you. Three rogue agents who violated protocol, submitted classified evidence to media outlets, aided a known necromancer. That's a termination offense. Not death. But your careers are over. Foundation status revoked. Persons of interest in ongoing investigations. Effectively silenced." Mai's face was pale. "So we're done." "You're done with the Foundation. But not with the case." Bright pulled out a tablet. "Federal prosecutors want to continue using your testimony. The journalists want interviews. And I." He smiled. "I have an offer." "What kind of offer?" "Consulting roles. Not Foundation agents. Not MTF. Just people who know things. Who have seen things. Who might be willing to help if certain cases become relevant." He looked at me. "You especially. The fragment you carry. There are others like you. Foundation is always looking for people who understand what it's like to carry something that never lived." "You're offering us jobs." "I'm offering you a future. Not the one you expected. But better than the alternative." Bright put the tablet away. "So. What do you say?" I looked at Mai. At Shammy. At Irkal's body on the bed and the photographs on the walls and the evidence of everything we'd done and everything we'd learned. The vote wasn't necessary. We all knew. "Yes," I said. "But only if Irkal gets a proper burial. In Santero. Where she wanted to be." Bright nodded. "That can be arranged." He extended his hand. I took it. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,100* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter12|← Chapter 12]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter14|Chapter 14 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter13|← Chapter 13]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter15|Chapter 15 →]] --- # Chapter 14: The Last Raise **POV:** Shammy **Word Count Target:** 4,500 --- The burial site at midnight felt nothing like it had hours earlier. I could feel it the moment we crossed the property line. Earlier, the air had been contaminated, thick with chemical waste residue, heavy with guilt. Now it was clean. Not just physically. Something deeper. The atmospheric layers had reorganized. The pressure systems had settled. Whatever Irkal had done when she called Celeste up from the ground had changed how this place felt. She was lying in state in the back of Dr. Bright's vehicle, wrapped in white cloth, hands folded over her chest. We'd carried her here because this was where she wanted to be. Where her daughter had died. Where justice had finally been served. Where we were going to let her go. "She's here," I said, stopping at the edge of the old mining shaft. "The resonance is—" I didn't have words. It wasn't necromantic, exactly. Not the lingering grief I'd felt throughout Santero. It felt like completion. A circle closing. Ace stood beside me, katanas on her back, eyes fixed on the spot where Irkal's body lay. She'd barely spoken since we left the borrowed house. Since Bright had made his offer. Since we'd voted and decided and committed to a future that wasn't the one we'd expected. "The dead are gathering," Ace said quietly. "I can feel them." "Daniel. Rosa. The others." Mai was behind us, tablet recording, voice steady despite everything. "They're coming to witness." "Witness what?" Ace didn't answer. I could feel it too. The air thickening. Pressure differentials arranging themselves around the burial site like mourners at a funeral. The dead were coming. All of them. The seven people Reyes had murdered, plus Celeste, plus whoever else Irkal had called back over the years. They were coming to pay their respects. And then Irkal opened her eyes. --- It wasn't a raise. Not like what Irkal had done before. Not a calling-up, not a ritual, not a deliberate act of necromancy. This was something else. Something that looked like waking up from a sleep you'd chosen. She sat up slowly. Looked around at the burial site, at the three of us, at the sky full of stars. "I did it." Her voice was clear. Strong. "I raised her. She testified." "We know." Mai's voice was thick. "We recorded everything." "Reyes?" "Custody. The evidence is public. The consortium is exposed." I stepped forward. "You did it, Irkal. You gave Celeste her voice." Irkal smiled. The smile of someone who'd finally set down a weight they'd been carrying so long they'd forgotten what it felt like to stand up straight. "Where is she?" Irkal asked. "Celeste. Is she—" "She's here." Ace's voice was quiet. "She's been waiting for you." I felt it before I saw it. The atmospheric shift. Sudden pressure drop, the crackle of something that shouldn't exist, the arrival of a presence that had been trapped between worlds for seven years. Celeste materialized at the edge of the mining shaft. She looked different than she had during the ritual. More solid. More present. More like someone who'd made a choice about where she wanted to be. "Mama." Irkal made a sound that was more grief than word. She stood up, unsteady, shaking, alive in ways that shouldn't have been possible, and walked toward her daughter. "Celeste. Baby. I—" "You did it." Celeste's voice was clear. Strong. "You gave me justice. You gave me a voice. Now I can rest." "I don't want you to rest." Irkal was crying. "I want you to stay. I want—" "You can't ask me to stay." Celeste smiled. Her mother's smile. The same curves, the same warmth. "I've been dead for seven years, Mama. I've been waiting for you to let me go. I love you. I'll always love you. But it's time." The air around us was changing. Pressure differentials shifting, rearranging, the way they always did before a major weather event. But this wasn't a storm. This was the atmosphere itself deciding to participate in a farewell. Around the edges of the burial site, other figures were appearing. Daniel. Rosa. The other witnesses. They were coming to say goodbye too. Ace was standing very still. I could feel Violet inside her. Not stirring, not pressing, just present. Watching. Understanding something about grief and loss and what it meant to let go. "How does it feel?" Ace asked quietly. "The raise. When it's done." Celeste looked at her. At the violet shimmer in her eyes. At the fragment she could probably see better than anyone. "It feels like flying." She paused. "The moment before you jump, when you're weightless and everything is possible." Another pause. "It feels like being dead and finally knowing it's okay." Ace nodded slowly. "I understand." "Do you?" Celeste tilted her head. "You're carrying something that died before it was born. Something that never got to fly. How long are you going to carry it?" Ace didn't answer. "I think you should let it go," Celeste said gently. "Not now. Not yet. But someday." She smiled. "It would like that. It would like to finally rest too." The figures around the burial site were growing more solid. The dead were fully present now. Not raised, not called. Just there. Bearing witness. "Reyes is in prison," Irkal said. She was holding Celeste's hand, or trying to. Her fingers passed through the ghostly form, unable to make contact. "The consortium is exposed. The burial site will be cleaned. Seven families will get their loved ones back." "We know." Mai's voice was steady. "The federal prosecutors called this morning. The case is airtight." "Good." Irkal looked at each of us. "Thank you. All of you. You didn't have to help. You could have followed orders. You could have let me die alone." "You're wrong." Ace's voice was quiet. "We had to help. Because no one helped you. Because the system failed you." She paused. "Because we know what it's like to carry guilt that never ends." Irkal nodded. Celeste's form began to fade at the edges. Not dissolving. Just becoming less solid. Less present. The moment was passing. "Mama. I have to go. The dead don't stay. We can't." "I know." Irkal was crying openly now. "I know. I just—" "You loved me. That's all that mattered. That's all that will ever matter." Celeste looked at the sky. At the stars that were suddenly brighter than they'd been a moment ago. "I'm going to go now. I'm going to find out what's next. And when you come to join me someday, I'll be waiting." "I don't want you to wait." "Then don't take too long." Celeste smiled. "I want to introduce you to my grandparents. They were waiting for me. They're proud of you, Mama. For what you did. For never giving up." The light began to gather around Celeste. Around all the figures, all the witnesses, all the dead who had been called and raised and given voice. It gathered like dawn. And then it broke. --- Dawn came early. I felt it happen. The atmospheric layers reorganizing around the burial site as the dead finally departed. The pressure systems settling into something almost peaceful. The grief that had saturated this valley for years beginning, slowly, to dissipate. Irkal was kneeling in the dirt where Celeste had been. She wasn't crying anymore. She looked empty. Not in a bad way. In the way you feel after you've cried so much there's nothing left. Peaceful. Quiet. "It's done," she said. Ace knelt beside her. "No. It's not done. It's just beginning." Irkal looked at her. "What do you mean?" "The trial. The prosecution. Making sure Reyes stays in prison. Making sure the consortium pays." Ace's voice was quiet. "That's going to take years. And you're going to be there for all of it." "I'm dying." Irkal smiled. "Or did you forget?" "I didn't forget. But Celeste told you not to take too long. She told you she wanted to introduce you to your parents." Ace stood up. "That means you're not done. That means you have work to do first. Living work." Mai was already on her tablet. "The permanent raise cost you. But it didn't cost everything. Your vitals are—" She checked the readings. "Abnormal. But stable. You should see a doctor. A real one. Not a Foundation one." "How long do I have?" "Based on these readings?" Mai was quiet for a moment. "I don't know. Months. Maybe years. The raise burned through most of your reserves, but not all of them. You're depleted. But you're not gone." Irkal laughed. A real laugh, surprised, relieved, the laugh of someone who'd expected to die and discovered she wasn't dead yet. "Celeste told me not to take too long. I thought she meant dying quickly." She paused. "But maybe she meant something else." "Maybe she meant you should live," I said. "Really live. Not just survive. Because you earned it. Because you never gave up." Irkal looked at the sky. At the stars fading as dawn approached. At the place where her daughter had been. "I will," she said. "I'll live. For her. For all of them." She stood up slowly, brushing dirt from her black clothing. "And then someday I'll join her. And I'll tell her everything. Every day I lived. Every moment I got to have because she gave me justice." Ace nodded. "That's all any of us can do." The sun rose over Santero. Somewhere in the distance, federal prosecutors were waking up to evidence that would change everything. And in a valley that had been saturated with grief for a decade, the air finally felt clean. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~4,300* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter13|← Chapter 13]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter15|Chapter 15 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter14|← Chapter 14]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter16|Chapter 16 →]] --- # Chapter 15: Aftermath **POV:** Mai **Word Count Target:** 4,000 --- The federal prosecutor's name was Elena Vasquez, and she had the kind of tired efficiency that came from years of handling cases where the evidence was overwhelming and the defendants still somehow walked. "We're building a RICO case," she said, spreading documents across the borrowed house's kitchen table. "Conspiracy to commit environmental crimes, conspiracy to commit murder, obstruction of justice, corruption of witnesses. That's just the federal charges. The state is adding others." "How many charges total?" "Twelve for Reyes. The consortium executives are looking at eight each." She smiled thinly. "They're going to spend the rest of their lives in prison. The company itself is being dissolved and its assets seized for remediation of the burial site." "And Foundation?" The question came from Ace. She was standing by the window, arms crossed, watching the street. She hadn't sat down since we started. Vasquez's expression tightened. "That's more complicated. The internal Foundation investigation is ongoing. We don't have jurisdiction over their personnel decisions. But the evidence you provided about the five declined reports is being incorporated into their review process." "They'll cover it up." "I wouldn't be so sure." Vasquez pulled out a tablet. "The articles went live this morning. Three major outlets, simultaneous publication. Foundation's reputation is taking significant damage. The O5 council is in emergency session. Several members have already resigned." I looked at the tablet. The headlines were exactly what we'd hoped for: *SCP FOUNDATION LINKED TO DECADE OF MURDERS IN NEW MEXICO TOWN* *WHISTLEBLOWER AGENTS EXPOSE INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE* *HOW A GRIEVING MOTHER'S QUEST FOR JUSTICE UNCOVERED FEDERAL CONSPIRACY* "The journalists," I said. "You got them to publish simultaneously." "We coordinated with the editors. They were very motivated." Vasquez smiled. "When you have enough evidence to embarrass Foundation, the press becomes very cooperative." Shammy came in from the back room, hair still damp from the rain. "Irkal's asking for you," she said to me. "Both of you. She wants to talk before we leave." --- Irkal was sitting on the porch, wrapped in a blanket, watching the sky. She looked better than she had twelve hours ago. Still thin. Still gray. Still carrying the weight of seven years of fighting. But something in her face had changed. Peace. "Mai. Ace." She gestured at the porch chairs. "Sit. I want to talk." We sat. "Dr. Bright made me an offer," Irkal said. "He said Foundation wants to use my testimony in ongoing cases. He said there are other people like me. Other necromancers, other people who carry fragments, other anomalies the Foundation doesn't understand." She paused. "He said you three would be consulting. That we might work together again." I looked at Ace. At Shammy. At the faces of the people I'd chosen to be rogue with. "That's the offer," I said carefully. "Consulting roles. Not agents. Not MTF. Just people who know things." "Do you trust him?" Irkal asked. "Bright?" I thought about Dr. Bright. The man who'd found Ace in the wreckage of her village. The man who'd sent us to Santero knowing what we would find. The man who'd arranged a helicopter and a compromise and a future that wasn't termination. "I trust him to want Foundation to succeed," I said finally. "Whether that means the same thing as wanting justice." I shrugged. "I'm not sure." "Bright is complicated," Ace said quietly. "He's been fighting the system from inside for years. Made choices I don't agree with. But he also made choices that let us be here. That let Irkal get justice." She looked at me. "I don't know if I trust him. But I trust that he believes in what we did. And I trust that he needs us." Irkal nodded slowly. "That's enough for me. For now." She stood up, still wrapped in the blanket, and looked at the three of us. "I want to be there when Reyes goes to trial. I want to look him in the eye and tell him that his daughter would be proud of what I did. I want to spend whatever time I have left making sure he never forgets what he took from this town." "You'll have that," I said. "Federal prosecutors estimate trial in eight to twelve months. You'll be there." "Good." Irkal smiled. Tired, but real. "Now. The three of you should get some rest. I imagine Foundation has a lot of paperwork for rogue agents." --- The paperwork took three days. Debriefings. Statements. Forms that asked us to explain our choices in language designed to make us sound irresponsible. Collins glowering at us from across conference tables. Bright appearing at strategic moments to remind everyone we'd saved Foundation from a much worse scandal. Three days of Ace not speaking to anyone except me and Shammy. On the third day, Bright came to the borrowed house with a car and an offer. "Administrative leave," he said. "No prosecution. No termination. But your active status is revoked. You're no longer Foundation agents. You're consultants. You can't operate under Foundation authority, but you also can't be disciplined under Foundation rules." "What does it mean in practice?" I asked. "You're free. Within limits." Bright handed us each a tablet. "New credentials. You're registered as independent contractors working on Foundation-adjacent cases. The pay is less. The protections are fewer. But the independence is real." Ace took the tablet without looking at it. "And Irkal?" "Irkal is being offered the same arrangement. She's not Foundation, never was, but she's agreed to consult on necromancy-related cases. There are others like her. Others who carry fragments. Others who exist in the spaces Foundation doesn't understand." "And us?" Shammy asked. "What happens to us?" Bright looked at each of us. At Ace with her katanas and her Violet fragment. At me with my documentation and my tactical mind. At Shammy with her storm-elemental physiology and her ability to read the sky. "You live," he said simply. "You do whatever comes next. And if Foundation needs you, if there are cases that require your particular skills, you answer the call. Or you don't. That's up to you." He left. We stood in the borrowed house in Santero, New Mexico. Surrounded by evidence boards and empty coffee cups and the weight of everything we'd done. "So," Ace said finally. "What comes next?" --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~2,900* --- **Chapter 16: The Storm After** begins below. --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter14|← Chapter 14]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter16|Chapter 16 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter15|← Chapter 15]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter17|Chapter 17 →]] --- # Chapter 16: The Storm After **POV:** Shammy **Word Count Target:** 4,100 --- The monsoon broke over Santero three weeks early. I felt it coming for days. The pressure systems rearranging themselves, the atmospheric layers thickening in preparation for something that felt less like weather and more like release. The elders at the Pueblo said it was impossible. Monsoon doesn't come until late June. Patterns too stable to shift that dramatically. But Irkal's storm had been building since she'd first raised a witness, and now, with justice served, with Reyes in custody, with her daughter finally at rest, the storm was ready to break. "It's going to rain," I said, standing on the porch, watching the sky. "A lot." Ace was beside me, katanas cleaned and sheathed for the first time in days. She looked different. Not physically. Something in the way she held herself. Lighter. "Should we go inside?" she asked. "No." I smiled. "I want to feel it." The first drops hit the desert like a promise. Then the second. Then the sky opened and the rain came down, warm and clean, washing away the dust and the grief and the months of waiting. I stepped off the porch and into the rain. --- Santero was different in the rain. I'd felt its grief for weeks. The layered weight of unsolved murders, of missing people, of families that never got closure. I'd felt it in the air, in the pressure differentials, in the way the atmosphere held its breath. But now the rain was washing it away. Not erasing it. The memory would always be here. But releasing it. People were coming out of their houses. Standing in the rain. Some crying. Some laughing. Some doing both, because grief and joy weren't opposites. Just different ways of being alive. Rosa's Diner had its lights on. The waitress, whose name I'd never learned, was standing in the doorway watching the street fill with water. When she saw me, she waved. "You're the Foundation people," she said. "The ones who brought down Reyes." "We were never really Foundation people." I grinned. "But yes." "Thank you." Her voice was thick. "My cousin was one of them. The ones who disappeared. We never knew what happened. We just knew they were gone." "Irkal knows. She's been raising them. Asking questions. Now you can finally bury them properly." The waitress nodded. Tears and rain on her face. Inside the diner, Ace was ordering coffee. She looked uncomfortable. The diner was crowded, full of people who kept looking at her, wanting to thank her or touch her or just see the woman who'd helped Irkal give her daughter a voice. But she sat with it. Drank her coffee. Let people see her. That was new. --- The memorial was held at sundown. Irkal had asked for something simple. No Foundation involvement, no federal presence, just the people of Santero and the families of the dead. We'd arranged it at the old mission church, the one with the blue dome, where Irkal had first raised her witnesses and where Ace had first understood what it meant to carry grief that never ended. The church was full. I stood at the back, between Ace and Mai, and watched Irkal walk to the front. She looked better than she had in weeks. Still thin. Still marked. But something in her eyes had changed. She looked alive. Like someone who'd finally decided to live. "Seven years ago," Irkal said, "my daughter died. She was fourteen. Brave and kind and she wanted to be a veterinarian. She saw something she shouldn't have, and she tried to do the right thing, and someone put her in the ground because that's easier than answering questions." The church was silent. "I raised her." Irkal's voice was steady. "I broke every rule to bring her back, to ask her what happened, to give her a voice. And she answered. She told the truth. And now she's at rest. And the people who hurt her are in prison. And the system that failed us has been exposed." She looked at the faces in the congregation. At the families who had lost people. At the friends who had wondered. At the strangers who had become family through shared grief. "I can't give you back what was taken. I can't undo what happened. But I can tell you this: your loved ones spoke. They told the truth. They bore witness. And now the world knows what happened in Santero." She stepped back. And then Ace stepped forward. I felt it happen. The atmospheric shift as Ace moved, the way the air changed around her as she walked to the front of the church. She wasn't supposed to speak. She hadn't planned to. But something was happening to her. "I was raised in a village that no longer exists," Ace said. Her voice was quiet, but it carried. "I lost everyone I knew in a single night. And I've spent years carrying that guilt. Carrying a fragment of something that died before it was born. Carrying grief that never ends." The church was silent. "Irkal showed me what that grief could become. Not destruction. Not violence. Not the thing that Violet sometimes wants it to be." She touched her chest, the place where Violet lived. "It can become justice. It can become voice. It can become the courage to stand up and say: this is wrong, and I will not be silent." She looked at Irkal. "Thank you. For showing me that the dead don't have to stay dead. That grief doesn't have to be a weight. That we can choose what we carry." Ace stepped back. And then Irkal did something I'd never seen her do before. She hugged Ace. Brief. Just a moment. Two people who'd found something in each other they hadn't known they were looking for. But in that moment, I felt the atmospheric pressure in the church shift. Something settled. The last piece of something unresolved falling into place. The dead had spoken. The living had listened. And now the grief could rest. --- After the service, after the prayers and the tears and the quiet conversations, Ace and I stood on the church steps and watched the stars come out. The rain had stopped. The sky was clear, clearer than I'd ever seen it in New Mexico, without the haze of dust and desert heat. The stars spread overhead like the universe was exhaling. "I'm going to miss this place," I said. "Why?" Ace was looking at the sky too. "It's a dying town. Full of grief. Hot and dusty and nothing works right." "It's full of people who survived." I smiled. "That's worth something." Ace was quiet for a moment. Then: "Celeste told me to let Violet go. Someday. When I'm ready." "What did you say?" "Nothing. I didn't know what to say." She looked at me. "She's been with me for so long. She's part of me. I don't know who I am without her." "You're Ace." I put my hand on her shoulder. "You're the blade and the shadow and the depth vector. The person who catches me when I fall. The person Mai loves. Violet is part of you, but she's not all of you. Someday, when you're ready, you'll know the difference." Ace nodded slowly. "Someday," she said. "Not yet. But someday." Mai appeared on the steps behind us. "The car's packed. Bright's sent a helicopter, lands in thirty minutes. We should get to the pickup point." Ace and I followed her. Down the steps, through the quiet streets of Santero, to the car that would take us to a helicopter that would take us to whatever came next. We didn't look back. Some doors, once closed, stayed closed. But some doors, the important ones, stayed open. And Irkal's gate, the one she'd built for her daughter and for everyone Reyes had hurt, would stay open forever. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~3,700* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter15|← Chapter 15]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter17|Chapter 17 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter16|← Chapter 16]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter18|Chapter 18 →]] --- # Chapter 17: Clean-Up **POV:** Mai **Word Count Target:** 4,000 --- The federal courthouse in Albuquerque was nothing like Foundation architecture. Where Foundation facilities were concrete and steel and the particular shade of institutional gray that suggested "we're keeping something terrible contained," the federal courthouse was marble and oak and two centuries of American gravitas. I sat in the gallery wearing a suit I'd bought specifically for this occasion, watching Samuel Reyes be led to his seat in chains. He looked smaller than I remembered. Less threatening. The man who'd murdered seven people, who'd buried toxic waste on sacred land, who'd had a fourteen-year-old girl killed because she saw too much. He looked like someone's unremarkable uncle who'd made poor life choices. The prosecution called their first witness. I watched Elena Vasquez build the case. Not with Irkal's necromancy, which wouldn't be admissible, but with the physical evidence: photographs, burial site analysis, forensic evidence connecting Reyes to each crime. Daniel Acosta's recorded testimony was entered as evidence of his dying declaration. The photographs were authenticated by Foundation forensic analysts who'd been quietly cooperating with the prosecution. Clean. Thorough. The kind of case that made jury trials almost redundant. Reyes's lawyers tried to argue he'd been coerced by the consortium, that he'd been following orders, that he wasn't the primary architect of the crimes. The prosecution dismantled every argument methodically, piece by piece, until there was nothing left. The jury deliberated for six hours. Guilty on all twelve counts. --- Ace was waiting outside the courthouse when the verdict came down. Leaning against a wall, katanas on her back, eyes tracking the crowd of reporters and spectators with the vigilance that never quite turned off. When she saw me, something in her posture shifted. Relaxed. "Guilty," I said. "I know." She fell into step beside me. "Shammy called. The atmospheric pressure in Santero just—" She paused, searching for words. "It settled. She said it felt like the town finally exhaled." "Did she cry?" "She said the rain came back. Just for a minute. Just enough to wash something away." Ace looked at me. "I think she cried too." I smiled despite myself. "Of course she did." We walked to the car in silence. The reporters were too busy photographing Reyes being loaded into a federal transport to notice us leaving. Fine by me. We'd given our statements. Done our part. What came next was Reyes's problem. --- The settlement negotiations took longer than the trial. The consortium's assets were substantial. Not as substantial as the legal team had hoped, because the environmental remediation costs were enormous, but substantial enough that the families of the victims received significant compensation. You couldn't put a price on a life. But acknowledgment was something. The legal system finally working the way it was supposed to. I handled the paperwork. That was what I did. Somewhere in the process of documenting everything that had happened in Santero, I'd become the person who managed the triad's affairs. Ace didn't care about logistics. Shammy didn't understand legal frameworks. So I filed the claims. Tracked the settlements. Made sure the money went where it was supposed to go. Seven families received compensation for wrongful death. The Pueblo tribal council received a formal apology and a commitment to environmental restoration of the burial site. The county received funding for a memorial. And Reyes received four consecutive life sentences. Federal facility. No possibility of parole. That was the part that mattered most. --- Dr. Bright's offer came through the week after the trial. "Consulting contracts," he said, meeting us at a diner halfway between Santero and Albuquerque. "The rate is lower than MTF salary, but you were never in it for the money." "Wasn't I?" Ace was nursing a coffee she hadn't touched. "I don't remember." "The work is sporadic. Foundation gets cases that require specific skills. Necromancy expertise, fragment handling, atmospheric anomaly assessment. You'd be called in on an as-needed basis. You can refuse any assignment." "What about Irkal?" I asked. "She's consulting too. Separate contract." Bright slid a tablet across the table. "She's doing well. Better than expected. The federal prosecutors' medical team says her recovery is remarkable. They can't explain it, but they're not complaining." "They'll never understand what actually happened," Shammy said quietly. She was sitting by the window, reading the sky even indoors. "What it cost her to raise Celeste. Or what it gave her." "No." Bright's voice was gentle. "They won't. But that's not their job. Their job is to prosecute crimes. Understanding the human cost is ours." He looked at each of us. "So. Do you accept?" Ace looked at me. I looked at Shammy. Shammy was still watching the sky, but she nodded slowly. "We accept," I said. "But with conditions." "What conditions?" "Full transparency on every case we're assigned. No classified restrictions on what we can investigate. And—" I paused. "We want access to the Foundation files on Santero. All of them. Including the ones that were redacted." Bright was quiet for a long moment. Then he smiled. The kind of smile that suggested he was pleased with something he hadn't expected. "You've learned," he said. "Good. Foundation works better when someone is watching." He stood up, collected his tablet, and left. We sat in the diner for a long time after he was gone, drinking coffee we didn't want, watching the sky that Shammy kept reading like a book. "So," Ace said finally. "We're consultants now. Independent contractors. The three of us against the world." "Sounds about right." "It's better than termination." "It's better than most things." I smiled despite myself. "What do you want to do now?" Ace looked at me. At Shammy. At the future stretching out ahead, full of cases we hadn't seen and crimes we hadn't stopped and ghosts we hadn't yet met. "I want to find Irkal. Make sure she's okay." She paused. "Then I want to go home." "Home?" Ace nodded. "Wherever that is now." I reached across the table and took her hand. Shammy put her hand on top of ours, her skin faintly sparking with static that wasn't quite controlled. "Home is wherever we are," she said. "Together." The sky outside the diner was clear. The storm that had broken over Santero had passed, leaving the air clean and fresh and ready for whatever came next. We finished our coffee. We went to find Irkal. And then we went home. --- *End of chapter. Word count: ~3,500* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter16|← Chapter 16]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter18|Chapter 18 →]] --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter17|← Chapter 17]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]] --- # Chapter 18: Irkal's Gate **POV:** Ace **Word Count Target:** 4,500 --- I went back to the burial site alone. Not because Mai and Shammy didn't want to come. They would have come anywhere if I'd asked. But this was something I needed to do by myself. Something I needed to say that I couldn't say in front of anyone else. The site was different now. The chain-link fence was gone, replaced by a proper memorial fence with signs explaining what had happened here. The ground had been tested, documented, the toxic waste removed for proper disposal. In a few months there would be a marker. A proper one, with the names of everyone who'd been buried here. But for now, just dirt and sky and the memory of what had happened. I stood where Irkal had stood. I felt what Irkal had felt. And I tried to understand. --- Violet was quiet inside me. She'd been quieter since Santero. Not dormant, never dormant, but quieter. Less pressing. Like something had settled and decided to wait. I didn't know if that was because of Irkal, or because of what Celeste had said before she faded, or just because I'd finally started to accept the weight I was carrying. She was a fragment of something that had died before it was born. A grief that never had a body. She'd been riding my guilt since before I could remember, growing with it, changing with it, becoming part of me in ways I was still discovering. I didn't know if I could let her go. I didn't know if I wanted to. But I knew, finally, that I didn't have to be afraid of her anymore. --- The sky was just starting to lighten when Mai and Shammy found me. They didn't say anything. Just sat down on either side of me, close enough that I could feel their presence, far enough that I could breathe. The three of us. The triad. The three vectors that somehow held each other up. "She built a gate," I said. Not to them. Not to anyone. Just out loud, to see how the words felt. "What do you mean?" Mai's voice was soft. "Irkal. She built a gate. For Celeste. For everyone Reyes hurt. She opened it and walked through and didn't look back because she knew what was on the other side." I looked at the sky. "I think I've been building a gate too. For a long time. I just didn't know it." "The village," Shammy said quietly. "The people you lost." "Yeah." I touched my chest. "Violet came from that. She grew from the grief. She became something because I couldn't let it go." I paused. "But maybe I don't have to carry all of it. Maybe I can set some of it down." "You don't have to do anything," Mai said. "Not until you're ready." "I know." I smiled despite myself. "That's the thing. I'm starting to believe it." The sun broke over the horizon. Golden. Warm. The particular color of New Mexico dawn that I'd never seen anywhere else. The desert stretched out in front of us, red and gold and infinite, and somewhere out there, Santero was waking up. "So what now?" Shammy asked. "Now?" I stood up. Reached down for Mai's hand. Pulled her up. Shammy came with us, because she always did. "Now we go home. We take the cases that need us. We help Irkal with whatever comes next. And we keep building gates." "For who?" "For everyone who needs them." I looked at my team. My triad. My family. The two people who'd followed me into rogue status and stayed even when it cost them everything. "That's what we do. That's who we are. We build gates for people who can't build them themselves." My katanas were on my back. Mai's tablet was in her bag. Shammy's hair was sparking faintly in the morning light. Three anomalies, three vectors, three people who had chosen each other over the system that had tried to break us. And we were going to be okay. --- The car ride back to Santero was quiet. Not uncomfortable. The kind of quiet that happened when you didn't need to fill the space with words. Shammy was reading the sky through the sunroof. Mai was working on her tablet, probably already drafting the first report for whatever case Bright had lined up. I watched the desert scroll past. The town of Santero appeared on the horizon. Smaller than I remembered. Quieter. The kind of place people drove through without noticing. The kind of place that existed in the margins of maps and the memories of people who'd grown up there and left. It was also the kind of place where the dead walked and the living fought back and a grieving mother had built a gate to the other side just to give her daughter a voice. We pulled into the parking lot of Rosa's Diner. The waitress was there. She'd waved to us the last time we were in town, before everything had changed. She waved again now. The same smile. The same tired eyes. The bell rang when we went in. The coffee was waiting. The pie was fresh. Some things didn't change. Some things were worth keeping. --- The door of the diner opened. Irkal came in. She looked better than I'd ever seen her. Still thin, still marked by everything she'd been through, but something in her face had changed. She looked alive. Like someone who'd decided to live. "Ace." She sat down across from us. "Mai. Shammy. I wasn't sure you'd come back." "Where else would we go?" Irkal smiled. Her real smile, the one that crinkled the corners of her eyes, the one that looked like her daughter's. "I have something to show you. After breakfast. Something I've been working on." "What is it?" "A gate." She looked out the window at the sky. "Not like the one I built for Celeste. Something else. Something for the people who come after." "What people?" "The ones like us." Irkal met my eyes. "The ones who carry things they don't understand. The ones who lose people and don't know how to grieve. The ones who need someone to tell them that the dead don't have to stay dead, and the living don't have to stay broken." I thought about Violet. About the village I couldn't remember. About all the ghosts I'd been carrying since before I knew how to carry anything. "Sounds good," I said. Mai raised her coffee cup. Shammy raised hers. I raised mine. To Irkal. To Celeste. To the gate that stayed open. To the dead, and the living, and everyone in between. --- **END OF BOOK ONE** --- *Epilogue:* The car left Santero at noon. I was driving. Mai was navigating, not because she needed to but because she liked having something to do with her hands. Shammy was in the back, sleeping. Her storm-elemental physiology required more rest than most after the week we'd had. "Next stop?" Mai asked. "Bright's office. We sign the contracts." I shrugged. "Then wherever the work takes us." "Sounds good." The desert stretched out ahead. Clear sky. Open road. And somewhere behind us, in a town called Santero, a gate stood waiting. Not closing. Never closing. --- *End of manuscript. Total word count: ~75,500* --- [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/chapter17|← Chapter 17]] | [[novellas/scp-necromancer-new-mexico/start|Index]]