The first body was found in a warehouse on Sunset Boulevard, and the coroner's initial report said "unknown cause" because the man's body was flat—not crushed, not dehydrated, not dissolved—flat, as if someone had taken a human being and run him through a steamroller made of God.

Jack Moran stood over the body, which was spread across the concrete floor like a rug that someone had laid out and then stepped on, and he took a long drag from his cigarette and exhaled through his nose and thought: this is going to be one of those cases.

He was forty-seven, which in the detective business meant he was old enough to have seen everything and young enough to still give a damn. He had been a naval intelligence officer during the war—had served in the Pacific, had seen things that kept him awake at three in the morning—and when the war ended he came back to Los Angeles, where nothing was the same and everything was the same and the only thing that hadn't changed was his ability to drink whiskey without it tasting like regret.

The woman who had hired him was sitting in a chair in the corner of the warehouse. She was wearing a black dress that cost more than Jack's car and a expression that cost more than that. She had hair the color of midnight and eyes the color of something you'd rather not name.

"Can you find out what happened to him?" she asked. Her voice was smooth and low, like a cello played in an empty room.

"I can try," Jack said. "But the answer might not be something you want to hear."

"The answer is never something I want to hear. That's why I hire detectives."

He looked at the body again. The man was perhaps thirty years old, well-dressed, well-groomed. His clothes were flat too—the fabric pressed against the concrete in a perfect silhouette. Jack knelt and touched the man's cheek. It was warm. Not the warmth of a living man, but the warmth of something that had been warm recently and had been preserved in this state.

"How did you find him?" Jack asked.

"In the garage," the woman said. "I came down to get my car. He was lying there, and I—" She stopped. "I couldn't move him. I called the police. They called you."

"Who are you?"

"Victoria Hale."

"Mr. Hale?"

"My husband is away on business. I'm alone in the house." She paused. "I didn't want to call the police. I wanted to call someone who wouldn't ask too many questions."

"I ask plenty of questions," Jack said. "It's what I do."

"Then you're the right person."

The case went nowhere for three weeks. Jack interviewed everyone who had been in the warehouse that night—two security guards who were drinking on the job and couldn't remember anything useful, a janitor who said the man had entered alone and left alone, which was impossible because the man never left, he was still there, flat on the floor—and he found nothing that pointed to a motive or a method. No signs of struggle. No weapons. No fingerprints except the victim's own, which were pressed flat against the concrete like his entire body.

The second body appeared in a hotel room on Wilshire Boulevard. This one was a woman, and she was flat on the bed, her sheets arranged around her in a way that suggested whoever had placed them there had tried to be respectful. Jack recognized the name when he saw it—Diana Ross, no relation to the singer who wasn't famous yet—she worked as a secretary for a man named Carl Voss, who was apparently involved in something that Jack couldn't quite figure out but was pretty sure involved guns and government secrets and enough money to make everyone in the room very dangerous.

Jack went to see Carl Voss.

Voss's office was on the twelfth floor of a building that smelled of leather and ambition. Voss himself was a tall man with thinning hair and eyes that told you he had seen things you hadn't and would never see.

"Miss Hale hired you," Voss said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"You shouldn't have."

"I get paid whether I should or not."

Voss poured two glasses of bourbon and pushed one across the desk. Jack took it but didn't drink it. He was waiting to see what Voss would say next.

"There is a government project," Voss said. "Classified. I'm not supposed to talk about it. But you're going to find out anyway, because the people who are behind this project know that you're going to find out, and they'd rather you find out from me than from someone who'll lie to you about it."

Jack set the glass down. "Go on."

"The project is called Project Two-Fold. Its purpose is the development of a dimensional weapon—a device that can reduce a three-dimensional object to two dimensions. Think of it as a very, very large sheet of paper. You can fold it, crease it, flatten it. But the object itself isn't destroyed. It's just... reoriented."

"You're telling me there's a weapon that turns people into posters."

"Not posters. More like... photographs. Without the frame."

"And who builds this weapon?"

"A division of Lockheed. I don't have clearance to discuss the engineering. What I can tell you is that the weapon is not entirely man-made. The core technology—the principle that makes it work—was not discovered, it was received."

"Received from whom?"

Voss looked at him with those hard, tired eyes. "That part of the project is above my pay grade. But I'll tell you this: the technology came from space. From something that was found in a crater in New Mexico in nineteen forty-seven. And the people who built the weapon thought they could control it. They thought they could aim it at an enemy and reduce that enemy to two dimensions and use it as a deterrent."

"A deterrent that turns people into posters."

"Something like that. But here's the thing, Mr. Moran: the weapon doesn't work the way they thought it would. It's not controllable. It's not precise. And it's not stopped at the perimeter. Whatever triggered it whatever sent that signal out into space—it's still going. And it's getting stronger."

Jack picked up his glass and drank the bourbon. It burned on the way down and burned more on the way back up. "What am I supposed to do about it?"

"You're supposed to do nothing. That's what I'm saying. Stop investigating. Go home. Drink your whiskey. Forget about Miss Hale and her dead neighbors."

Jack stood up. "I don't forget things, Mr. Voss. It's my job to remember them."

He left the office. In the hallway, he passed a man who looked like he worked for someone who worked for someone who worked for Voss, and the man looked at Jack with an expression that said: you should listen to him. Jack ignored it. He had been ignoring warnings his entire adult life, and the only one that had ever saved him was the one he hadn't heard.

The third body was a man Jack didn't know, found in an alley behind a bar in Chinatown. By this point, there were four bodies total, and the press had started calling it the "Flat Murders," which was accurate but misleading, because nobody had been murdered in the traditional sense. There was no murderer. There was something else. Something bigger.

Jack stood on the roof of his apartment building on a rain-saturated Thursday night, looking at the sky. The stars were wrong. He couldn't explain it to anyone, not even to himself, but he could see it: the stars in the direction of Orion were not points of light anymore. They were lines—thin, faint lines, like scratches on the surface of a dark plate. The sky was changing. Something was happening to it. And no amount of drinking or investigating or pretending that none of it mattered was going to change the fact that he was a private detective standing on a roof in a rain-soaked city, watching the stars get flatter by the hour, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

He took another drag from his cigarette. The rain soaked through his jacket. He didn't move.

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