Page 42 of Property of Scar

At least they were sealed.

Crate seven from the left, third row, is open. The seals are intact, the bolts undrawn because it was opened from the inside.

I stand in front of it for a long moment. “The Voss family has been running a subcontract.”

“What does that mean?” Rhett asks.

“It means something crossed the border inside our shipment that we didn’t agree to carry.” I run my thumb along the edge of the crate. The interior smells old, but there’s something beneath that, something that doesn’t belong to the wood or the iron fittings, something that was here long before either of them. “Something that was sleeping.”

Bennett steps closer, reads the interior of the crate the way angels read things, not with eyes exactly. His expression doesn’t change, but his jaw tightens by a single degree. “A hollow.”

Rhett’s head snaps toward him. “You’re fucking joking?”

“When do I joke?”

Almost never.

That’s the problem.

A hollow is a psychic predator with no body of its own—it is the mind, it is the appetite—it moves between hosts and feeds on consciousness, leaving the meat intact because the meat isn’t what it wants. It can’t be stabbed, burned, or compelled.

I can’t compel it or use my allure on it.

My gift works on minds, and a hollow has no mind to grip.

It is the grip.

We find the second dock worker at the far end of the hold, standing so close to the steel wall that his forehead almost touches it, close enough that there should be heat, condensation, something to mark that a living body is present.

There isn’t.

He doesn’t react when we come in, not to the sound of boots on metal, not to the shift in the air, not to the fact that the space behind him is no longer empty. The hold carries on around him, machinery humming, water moving somewhere beyond the hull, the low, constant pulse of the dock, and he stands inside it like he’s been set there and forgotten.

Time stretches out around the dock worker standing across from me.

Not long enough to count properly, but long enough for the silence around him to start pressing at the edges of my instincts. Long enough for me to notice how completely still he’s gone beneath the sweat, steel-capped boots, and faded dock jacket.

Then he exhales.

Slowly, so fucking thin and controlled.

The sound drags out rough through the quiet room, but something about it feels off, like he’s reminding himself how to do it instead of his body handling it on instinct.

The breath fades.

But nothing comes after.

He just stands there, motionless, as the fluorescent lights hum overhead, and the distant noise of the docks rumbles faintly through the walls, his body settling back into a stillness that doesn’t belong to something alive.

The body holds itself upright without the micro-movements that should be there, without the constant, unconscious corrections that keep a human frame balanced and alive, like it’s being kept in place by something that doesn’t need those things.

The hollow is not in him.

It’s wearing him.

The thought doesn’t arrive all at once. It settles in piece by piece, each detail slotting into place until there’s no room left for anything else.

He moves, and the second it happens, every survival instinct I’ve got slams awake hard enough to hurt.