## Act I: The Call (approx. 20%)

The rain made everything worse.

Jack Morrisey knew this the way a man knows his own pulse—routinely, without enthusiasm. The November storm had been howling along the East Coast for two days, turning the streets of downtown Los Angeles into rivers that reflected neon signs in shattered pieces. His office on Broadway was on the second floor, which meant the water was creeping up the stairs, and he was drinking his third cup of coffee that tasted like it had been brewed in a garage.

The phone rang at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday.

Jack let it ring four times. Then he picked it up.

"Morrisey," he said.

"Can you meet tomorrow? I'll pay double your rate."

The voice on the other end was smooth and tired at the same time, like a man who had been speaking for too many hours and knew he needed to stop but couldn't.

"Who is this?"

"Victor Castle. I have a problem, and I don't trust the police."

Jack knew the name. Everyone in LA who knew about certain things knew the name. Victor Castle was a ghost who still cast a shadow—former military, current nothing, and allegedly the only person in America who could tell you what was going to happen before it happened.

"Come to my office at ten," Jack said. "And don't come with the police."

## Act II: The Investigation (approx. 30%)

Victor Castle showed up at ten precisely. He was a small man, forty-two years old, with the pale, twitchy complexion of someone who had spent too many years indoors. He wore a suit that had been expensive once and a nervous energy that was always current.

"I have dreams," Victor said, sitting in the chair across from Jack's desk without being invited. "Every night, the same dream. An explosion. In a city I've never visited. A Japanese city. I can see the details—the shape of the buildings as they collapse, the way the light hits the dust cloud. I know things about that explosion that no living person should know."

Jack lit a cigarette. "What do you want me to do about it?"

"I want you to find out who did this to me."

"Do what?"

"Who gave me these dreams. Who put this in my head."

Jack exhaled smoke toward the water-stained ceiling. "Mr. Castle, dreams aren't put in anyone's head. Not like that."

"Then explain why I remember the names of thirty thousand people who died in that explosion. Explain why I can tell you which buildings survived and which ones didn't. Explain why the psychologists at Walter Reed said my brain shows patterns consistent with someone who was there."

Jack stared at him. The storm rattled the window.

"Go home, Mr. Castle," Jack said. "Take an aspirin. See a psychiatrist."

Victor stood up. He looked almost disappointed. "You're not going to help me."

"I'm a detective, not a priest."

Victor paid him anyway—a hundred dollars in crisp bills, left on the desk without ceremony—and left.

Three days later, Victor Castle was dead.

He jumped from the fourteenth floor of the Wilshire Grand Hotel. The police called it suicide. Jack called it something else, because on the morning after Victor's death, Jack received a plain envelope containing a key to a locker at Union Station and a slip of paper with twelve names and twelve cities written in Victor's handwriting.

Jack started with the first name.

## Act III: The Contagion (approx. 35%)

The investigation was a descent into a world Jack had always sensed existed but had never imagined he would enter.

The twelve names were all veterans of the 1943 campaign. Twelve men and women, aged thirty-one to fifty-six, scattered across the United States from Boston to San Francisco. All of them had served in branches of the military that did not officially exist. All of them had experienced the same "dreams" Victor had experienced.

And eight of them were already dead.

The fifth name on the list was a woman named Helen Cross who lived in a boarding house in Cambridge. She was thirty-four, a former radio operator, and she lived in a room that smelled of lavender and anxiety.

"They came for me in March," she told Jack, sitting on the edge of her bed with her hands clasped tightly in her lap. "Men in civilian clothes. They asked me about Project Prometheus. I didn't know what they meant, but they showed me files—my files. Medical records I never signed. Psychological evaluations I never read. I was seventeen when they tested me, Mr. Morrisey. Seventeen."

"What were they testing?"

"Sleep deprivation. Sensory overload. They put us in rooms with no light and no sound and kept us awake for eleven days at a time. Then they'd show us images—military photographs, maps, intelligence reports—for three seconds and ask us to recall every detail. The theory was that if we could train our brains to process and retain information under extreme stress, we could create soldiers who could... predict enemy movements. Read situations like a chessboard."

"And did it work?"

Helen laughed, and the laugh cracked. "It worked until it didn't. Twelve subjects. Eight didn't make it. Their brains burned out. The other four of us—we kept the ability. The ability to see the shape of events before they happen. To sense the pressure points in a situation the way a sailor senses the wind."

Jack watched her hands tremble. "Victor Castle said something similar."

Helen's eyes widened. "He's dead?"

"Jumped."

"Was he seeing the numbers?"

"What numbers?"

"The countdown. Every time the ability gets strong, I see numbers—dates, times, coordinates. Victor saw them too. I know he did."

Jack felt something shift in his chest. A pressure, like the room had tilted.

He had been seeing numbers for two days.

He had not told anyone. He had told himself it was stress—the investigation, the late nights, the rain that wouldn't stop. But as he sat in Helen's lavender-scented room, he realized with a cold, unmistakable clarity that the numbers he had been seeing matched exactly the dates and times Victor Castle had written in his final journal—the journal Jack had found locked in a safe behind a painting in Victor's apartment.

The numbers were counting down to something.

And the countdown had already begun.

## Act IV: The Choice (approx. 15%)

Jack sat in his office at 3 AM, the rain still falling, the twelve names spread across his desk like a hand of cards he didn't want to play.

The numbers were in his head now, clear as a clock ticking. He could see them overlaying everything—the desk, the walls, the reflection in the window. A date. A time. A place.

October 14, 1947. The Harborfreight Warehouse, Pier 42. 11:47 PM.

He knew this was not intuition. He knew this was not coincidence. He knew, with the same certainty that told him his own name, that something was going to happen at that place and time. Something Victor Castle had seen coming in his dreams. Something the men who had run Project Prometheus wanted to keep hidden.

Jack picked up his gun. He loaded it with the deliberate care of a man who had done this before.

He could go to the warehouse. He could see what was going to happen and try to stop it—or at least try to understand it. Or he could go home, drink himself to sleep, and wake up tomorrow with nothing but a headache and the vague memory of a dream he couldn't quite recall.

He chose the warehouse.

But as he stood up and reached for his coat, the numbers shifted. The date stayed the same. The time changed.

11:47 PM was no longer Pier 42.

It was his office. Tonight. 11:55 PM.

Jack looked at the clock on the wall. It was 11:50.

He had five minutes to decide what kind of man he was going to be when the dream became real.