Hunting The Monsters

Julia — First-Person POV

The alarms ran for exactly eleven seconds.

Then they stopped.

Not because the threat had passed. Because someone had cut them. The specific silence of a system that had been speaking and had been silenced — more alarming than the noise had been, in the specific way that unexpected silence was always more alarming than expected noise.

Alan moved.

Kai moved.

I moved.

The security team's radios crackled simultaneously — three different positions, three different voices, all