The Providence of Broken Glass
Chapter 1: The Providence of Broken Glass
The vision shattered like the windshield.
One moment, Katrine Dubois was arguing with her editor, Mark Thorne, his voice a warm, familiar rumble against the low hum of the newsroom. The next, the world kaleidoscoped into a nightmare of screaming metal, the coppery taste of blood flooding her mouth, and the piercing, cold sensation of glass peppering her skin. She saw a street sign—Taylor Way, heading towards the Lions Gate Bridge—blurred by rain and velocity. And eyes. Pale, lidless eyes staring from the rearview mirror.
“Katrine? Kat? Jesus, are you okay?”
Mark’s hand was on her arm, his face etched with concern. She was gripping the edge of his desk, her knuckles white. The newsroom chatter, which had been a comforting white noise, now felt like a hostile cacophony.
“I… I need some air,” she stammered, pulling away. Her phone felt like a lead weight in her pocket. She’d been live-posting about the city’s new public art installation. Her followers, her 150,000 followers, expected wit and polished insight. They didn’t pay for psychic episodes.
In the relative quiet of the women’s restroom, she splashed cold water on her face. The reflection in the mirror was hers: sharp green eyes, a face framed by dark hair that usually looked professional but now just looked strained. The influencer, the journalist who exposed civic corruption, reduced to a trembling mess by a daymare.
It’s just stress,she told herself.The deadline on the infrastructure piece. Chloe borrowing money again. Grandma’s worsening dementia.It had been happening more frequently since her grandmother had been moved to the care home. The doctors said it was latent anxiety, a familial predisposition for hysteria. They offered pills.
But the taste of blood was still there.
Her phone buzzed. Not a notification, but a direct message from a source she’d been cultivating for weeks—a paranoid, anonymous tipster who spoke in riddles about “things wearing human skin” in city hall.
Unknown Number:They’re watching the channels. The cracks are thin but widening. He is in the city. The Calculator. They need his blood for the equation. Find him before the hollow men do.
Katrine’s breath hitched.The hollow men.The term echoed in the empty space the vision had left behind. She typed a reply, her thumbs clumsy.
Katrine:Who is the Calculator? Where?
Unknown Number:You already know. You’ve seen the edges of it. Look past the face they show. Listen for the silence behind their words.
A wave of frustration washed over her. Cryptic nonsense. It was always like this. Leads that went nowhere, sources that vanished. Yet… the vision. The accident on the bridge. It felt connected. A cold certainty settled in her gut.
She marched back into the newsroom, a new purpose straightening her spine. “Mark, I need to follow up on the city hall source. I think it’s bigger than we thought.”
Mark leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his hair. “Kat, the budget meeting is today. The art piece. That’s what people are engaging with. This other thing… it’s a ghost story.”
“It’s not,” she insisted, her voice low and intense. “I have a feeling. A strong one.”
He studied her face, seeing the lingering fear she tried to mask with determination. He cared for her, too much sometimes, and it warred with his editor’s pragmatism. “Okay,” he sighed. “But lightly. Don’t go burning any bridges. And file the art piece by five.”
Across the city, Sergeant Franklin Pike stood at the edge of a crime scene in a damp alley off Hastings Street. The victim, a homeless man known as “Prophet” Pete, had been mutilated in a way that made Franklin’s combat-hardened stomach turn. Symbols, crude and ancient, were carved into his flesh. The coroner was muttering about ritualistic killing, a cult.
Franklin’s jaw was tight. “Crazies,” he muttered to his partner. “Some meth-head with a knife and a head full of nonsense.”
“Looks pretty elaborate for a tweaker, Frank,” his partner replied, nodding to the precise, geometric patterns.
Franklin shook his head. He’d seen real monsters. They didn’t hide in alleyways carving symbols; they hid in plain sight, wore uniforms, and set IEDs that tore good men into scraps. This was just the city’s filth, a different kind of warzone, but one he understood. There was a perp, a weapon, a motive. Facts. Things you could hold onto.
His radio crackled. “All units, be on the lookout for a female, mid-30s, dark hair. Wanted for questioning in connection with the threats against Deputy Commissioner Sterling. Name, Katrine Dubois. A journalist. Consider her unstable and possibly armed.”
Franklin’s face darkened.Journalists.Stirring up trouble, creating chaos from nothing.Unstable.He knew the type. He’d met them in Iraq, looking for a story with no regard for the truth on the ground. And now threatening a good man like Sterling?
He pictured this Dubois woman: a fanatic, a conspiracy theorist, dangerous because she believed her own lies. Another kind of crazy in a city full of them. Another problem to be contained.
He had no idea that his path and the “unstable journalist” were already converging, drawn together by a fate written in stars older than time, a fate she had already begun to see in splintered fragments of glass and blood.
