I didn’t sleep. I didn’t even try.
I kept expecting another photograph to appear beside my bed—another impossible piece of evidence that reality had quietly changed while I wasn't looking.
The old Polaroid sat on the desk like a piece of radioactive debris. I had spent three hours staring at it, my magnifying glass hovering over the grainy, faded image of Damien Cross. The man in the picture wasn't merely similar. He was identical—the same sharp brow, the same hard jaw, the same scar bisecting his eyebrow.
I held the photograph beside my reflection in the mirror. Then I looked at the Damien I had seen yesterday in the garage—the man who leaned into the silence, the man who carried the weight of the Iron Reapers on his back. They were the same. But logic had no place in the mountain, an
