Five quiet weeks broke wide open — and cost the crew someone they should have protected.
Five weeks passed since the crew fled the Belenko townhouse. This is what happened next.
The team (minus Billie, off visiting her dad) spent the downtime digging through everything they'd stolen from Threefold.
Susan buried herself in the archive bundles. Paulie pulled apart Pete's old computer disk by disk. And Randall — restless, itching for a normal life the universe won't let him have — built something out of the stolen city map: a whiteboard-then-chalkboard-then-the-wall statistical breakdown he called The Model. It confirmed what they'd suspected since the Threefold break-in: one node in Willowgrove is a Keystone — the single point everything else is built to hold in place.
Then Randall's math threw up a number that shouldn't have existed. A case number, calculated but never written on the map. It matched a file Susan couldn't find anywhere in the archive.
Paulie knew why. Over cigarettes, he confessed to Susan and Johnson: weeks ago, during the original document heist, he'd quietly taken one file home and never told anyone. It was Pete's. It was the first time either of them had heard Pete's name.
Pete's own disks filled in the rest. Before he was ever transferred, he'd been investigating Willowgrove on his own — UFO sightings, unexplained power fluctuations at 2 to 4 a.m., a retired schoolteacher who told him something was “testing the surface, like knocking on a door from the other side.” Recurring graffiti: a painted eye, and the words ARE ALL YOUR EYES OPEN? And buried three weeks before his transfer offer arrived — a redacted government memo describing an undocumented structure at the edge of Willowgrove, officially just “green space.” His last private note, before the transfer letter changed everything: “The lights aren't coming down. Whatever this is, it's already here. The sightings aren't visitations. They're symptoms.”
His personnel file confirmed the ugly part: his promotion — the thing that physically pulled him away from Paulie — wasn't a promotion at all. It was engineered.
Meanwhile, back at the bar: a car had been parked across the street for a week, never coming in. Little Sherm hacked the DMV and traced it straight to Kairos Consulting, registered to the downtown Tower — then hit it with a No Park Zone citation and watched it get towed off under everyone's amused, slightly unsettled gaze. Johnson also worked out that the dead crows showing up on the doorstep weren't a threat — Papa Legba had been quietly killing off whatever's been watching the bar. And the “big dog attack” the regulars keep gossiping about? Johnson's pretty sure he knows exactly who that was.
With Pete now looking less like a missing friend and more like the load-bearing center of the whole conspiracy, the crew decided it was time to drive to Willowgrove and find him.
They didn't make it out the door.
A breaking news report stopped them cold: Janine had been found dead, floating in the canal. An old woman sat knitting on the far bank, watching, saying nothing.
Susan reached out to Janine's spirit through her notepad. What came back was worse than an accident — someone had lured her there and questioned her for hours, hunting for the crew. Janine never gave them up. She didn't know anything to give.
The team rerouted to the morgue to see her body — and get answers. Johnson bought a few private minutes with some old-veteran charm. What walked in instead was a very large, very hairy man mid-transformation, and everything came apart at once: gunfire down the hallway, a silver cross snatched off a nearby corpse and hurled into the chaos, a fire extinguisher blasted into an improvised smoke screen, Paulie reaching Janine's last memories through her own body one final time — and Little Sherm driving a company van straight through the ambulance bay to pull everyone out.
They got away. Wounded, shaken, and — for reasons nobody's fully processed yet — with Janine's body still in the van.