We leave the park, and he guides me into a black SUV parked a block away. The windows are tinted, the driver silent. We drive in tense silence for fifteen minutes, until we reach an unmarked building on the edge of town, squat and gray and humming with security cameras. We’re buzzed in, then ushered down a corridor to a secure elevator. As the doors slide shut, the colonel finally speaks again.
“You ever hear of Project Shepherd?”
“Well,” he says, folding his arms. “You’re about to.”
The elevator opens into a long underground hallway. The air smells sterile, metallic. We pass guards who nod to the colonel and glance at me with vague suspicion. At the end of the hall is a steel door. He punches in a code. It clicks open.
Inside is a room filled with old photographs, maps with pins, dusty file boxes—and at the center, a glass case. Empty. The colonel walks straight to it.
“That’s where your grandfather’s medal belonged,” he says. “We lost track of it the day he disappeared. Until today.”
I blink. “Disappeared? He died in his sleep last week.”
He turns sharply. “No, he didn’t. That wasn’t your grandfather.”
My skin goes cold. “What are you talking about?”
“The man who raised you may have been Arthur Brennan—but if he died last week, it wasn’t natural. And it wasn’t time.”
“He was part of an elite recovery unit,” the colonel says. “Not just war missions—containment. Retrieval. Artifacts. Things that didn’t belong in the hands of governments or criminals.”
“What kind of things?”
He points to the medal. “That’s not just a decoration. It’s a key.”
I stare at it. It looks like any old war medal—bronze, engraved, scratched around the edges from years of handling.
“You’re telling me this… this opens something?”
He nods. “And not just a door.”
The colonel pulls out a second file and places it on the table. It contains schematics, strange inscriptions, and a single word at the top: Thresher.
