The officer spun the rotary dial—three turns, half a turn, three more—like a slow windmill grinding dusk, then pressed the handset to his ear.

He glanced back at Hedi, his face wearing a silence tilted like gravity had slipped, as if a picture frame were sliding down the wall.

The room filled with deep, chill air, Ice Age-cold, like a small prehistoric beast sealed in glacier for fifty thousand years, and the hush thickened to something dense.

“No one’s picking up.” He hung up and redialed: three turns, half a turn, three turns. A brief, sharp tone stabbed the line, then faded, like a phone buried in wet sand.

Hedi sat sideways on the sofa, one leg lightly hooked over the other’s knee. Her fingers drifted over the leather’s cratered grain, and it felt like the pocked face of the moon.

A strange thought flashed—inside the sofa, tens of thousands of furniture ants might be crawling. Revulsion spiked first. She sprang up, unable to shake the absurd swarm.

Just then, the officer offered the phone to Hedi, his expression tight, like stone under rain.

“Hello?” Lilliana’s voice cupped the line.

Hedi pressed the handset and let silence swell. Her lips felt puffed, like a dolphin’s belly, useless and soft against the words.

“Hello? Hello? Are you there?” Lilliana asked, light but insistent, like a chick pecking grain.

“I’m here.”

Lilliana recognized her immediately and chirped, oddly bright: “Oh—oh! Professor Melvina! You’re calling about the Dark Realm, aren’t you?”

“Mm.”

“You don’t sound well. Are you feeling off?”

Hedi shifted the phone, kneading her eye sockets like sore fruit. “I thought of something bad.”

“The Dark Realm’s about to wake?”

“More or less… that.”

“After speaking with the Chief, I used our institute’s equipment to lock the window—tomorrow evening, between 18:00 and 19:30.”

“If you knew,” Hedi tilted her chin and stared at the wall, “why didn’t you call?” A cushion-sized oil painting hung there, a lush forest cheap as a dollar-store trinket.

“Because blind, disabled, small, and pitiful.”

“You’re disabled?” The words slipped out. Regret landed hard. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean… I mean…”

“It’s fine. We haven’t met.” Lilliana paused, thought, then asked, “Did my phrasing just shift my personality to you?”

“You mean the ‘oh-oh’ and ‘small and pitiful’?”

“Back to the Dark Realm.” Her tone flipped, crisp as winter. “Beyond the wake window, I can give you the last erosion frequency.”

Hedi faltered at the pace, words catching like thorns. “Not this time?”

“It hasn’t awakened, so the new frequency is unknowable.”

Hedi changed her stance, wanting to shove the handset down her throat. “That’ll get townsfolk mutated!”

“There’s a simple defensive rite. Former Investigators used it to cut the risk.”

“Tell me.”

“You’ll need Viola’s crystal pendant.”

“I don’t even know if she’s wearing one.”

Pages rustled on Lilliana’s end, dry as leaves. “After the incident in Stratford, I inventoried our gear. Viola never returned the pendant.”

“Fine. Tell me how to start the rite.”

“Before that, memorize this: the smaller the field, the stronger the defense.”

“How small?”

“At most five people.”

Hedi pinched her brows into odd shapes, frustration creasing like folded paper. “That’s tiny! Naghtown’s residents—”

“They can shelter at home.”

“You said mutation can happen even at home.”

“Think of a surgery,” Lilliana explained, voice scalpel-cool. “Home turns nine deaths for one life into one in ten hope.”

“I hate probabilities.”

“At least there’s a choice, right?”

Hedi let silence sit in her chest like a wet coat. “How long till the Investigator reaches Naghtown?”

“It’s sunny here, but the broadcast says you’re under heavy rain. With that kind of storm, I can’t give an exact ETA. Nature runs the variables.”

“Just so you know… a landslide blocked the road.”

“Mm.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“On the contrary,” Lilliana said, dry as paper, “I’m very anxious.”

“Anxious doesn’t fix it, so you act calm?”

“I’ve dispatched Daniele. She’s a battle-scarred Investigator, steady under pressure. I believe she can turn this one around.”

“Okay.” Hedi tightened the black hair tie, gathering loose strands like bundling reeds. “But we’re not trained in Dark Realm lore. We can’t hold out long.”

“On that—do you know where it’ll awaken?”

“The forest around Molokov Bay Chapel.”

Lilliana sighed lightly, the sound a thin reed. “I warned the Chief before. I’ll warn you again. Naghtown’s faith runs deep. If the Sacred Cathedral seeds the corrosion, that’s bad.”

“I understand.” Hedi thought of the Holy Maiden, a white candle in a storm. She prayed her identity wouldn’t spark the uncontrollable.

“Prepare for the worst.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like I said—home can’t fully block mutation.”

Hedi shut her eyes, frustration washing like brine. “At the instant it wakes, can we enter and shut the core?”

“For ordinary people, absolutely not.”

“What about Investigators?”

“They carry anti-corrosion crystals and can enter. But every Dark Realm is unique. With the chance to get lost, finding and closing the core is a question mark.”

“You mentioned the last erosion frequency. That means an Investigator once shut Naghtown’s Dark Realm. So you should have a map. Or navigation data.”

“Sadly,” Lilliana sighed, breath hollow as a shell, “the former director’s strategy was brute-force manpower.”

“What do you take human life for?”

“Since I took over, that’s dropped a lot.”

Hedi paused like a held note. “Evelyn Stratford.”

“If Naghtown ends like the Shattered City, you can hold me accountable. But I won’t let that tragedy repeat.”

“Sorry…” Hedi tilted her ear, guilt ringing like thin glass. “I’m not pushing blame. I’m just watching the town I’ve lived in sixteen years…”

“I get it. Now, I’ll tell you how to deploy the rite.”

Hedi carved the steps into memory, each beat like a knot in rope. When the call ended, she wrote them down at once, ink raining onto paper.

Moments later, Lilliana had barely set the phone down when a message crashed in with pounding footsteps: “The wake time moved up. Tomorrow morning, seven!”

“Confirmed? Or equipment failure?”

The Investigator panted, shaking his head like a wet dog. “We did a full overhaul last year. This likely means human interference.”

“Then it’s the Chief’s Canary…” Lilliana snatched the phone and called Hedi back.

Ringback.

Ringback.

No movement on the other end, the line a pond without ripples.