Timestamp:23:47.
Duration of Attack:Approximately eleven seconds.
Casualties:Three human fatalities.
Scion:Female, approximate post-turning age 3-5 days. Behavior consistent with no sire contact, no control framework, and no feeding discipline.
Signature:Matches the same base-level turning marker as attacks one, two, and three. Same bloodline. Same sire.
I lean back in my chair and look at the full board. Four red points on the territory map, each with its timestamp and casualty count pinned beneath it. Spread across our operational area, two near the compound periphery, one on the eastern commercial strip, and now one dead center at Sins & Spirits. No clustering, no obvious escalation corridor, no pattern a human analyst would identify as intentional.
But I’m not a human analyst.
My Data Sight doesn’t read the surface. It reads what’s underneath the surface, the energy topology, the digital fingerprint, the invisible infrastructure of intent that leaves tracks in every system it touches. And what I’m reading underneath the surface of these four attacks has been giving me a specific, cold, unpleasant feeling in my chest for three weeks.
These scions aren’t wandering.
They’re being deployed.
Not controlled, they’re too feral for remote control. No sire alive can reach into a three-day-old scion with no training and steer it toward a specific location. But they don’t need to be steered if they’re created close enough to their target. If you turn someone a mile from the location, let the bloodlust loose, and the target is the nearest concentration of human heartbeats, the scion walks itself into range.
Every damn time.
The sire isn’t losing control of these scions.
The sire is counting on the loss of control.
Each attack carries the same turning signature. I verified it on attack two, confirmed it on three, and have now confirmed it on four. The same base blood, the same Original’s mark—old, specific, and identifiable to anyone with the ability to read bloodline signatures in the digital forensic captures I’ve been pulling from the incident scenes.
I know who this bloodline belongs to.
I have been not-saying it for three weeks, running the analysis on a loop and hoping the result would change, because saying it out loud makes it real, and real means the club is sitting inside a problem considerably larger than four dead humans and an uncontrolled scion problem.
Four attacks. Escalating frequency—six days between attack one and two, three between two and three, three days between three and tonight.
The interval is compressing.
Which means either the sire’s patience is narrowing, the production rate is increasing, or both.
My veins pulse blue-white at the edges where the technomancy runs hot, the electrokinesis wanting to discharge into something, the specific restless energy I get when the analysis is complete and the conclusion is one I don’t have the luxury of sitting with.
I close the board and pick up my phone.
Crave answers on the second ring. The man sleeps like a soldier, lightly and with one ear already open. “Talk,” he says.
“Sins & Spirits just took a hit. Fourth attack in three weeks. Feral scion, three dead, now in the wind. Scorch and Dread were close, arrived clean, no trace left to follow.” I pull the incident board back up as I speak, running through the data one final time, wanting to be certain before I hand him the conclusion. “I’ve been tracking the bloodline signature across all four attacks. It’s consistent… same sire every time.”
“Who,” Crave says, and it’s not a question. It is the voice of a man who has already run his own calculation and is asking for confirmation, not information.
“I don’t have a name to give you yet,” I say. “But I have a pattern.” I pull the territory map to the front of my screen. Four red points, three weeks of nights, one compressing interval. “This isn’t random. These aren’t strays. Someone is creating scions inside our territory, deliberately and sequentially, and leaving them uncontrolled because an uncontrolled scion is a weapon… it goes where the heartbeats are and does what its biology tells it to do. It leaves a body count behind without anyone needing to pull a trigger.” I zoom out on the map, the four points sitting like the corners of something not yet completed. “The attack sites aren’t random either. They’re covering the territory grid, testing our response times, finding the gaps.”
Silence on the other end.
The kind of silence Crave produces when he’s running numbers.
“Four attacks,” I say. “Eleven days… compressing. The next one hits inside forty-eight hours if the interval holds.”
“You’re certain of the pattern.”
