The Well wasn't on any map.Not a physical one, anyway.Ash didn’t explain much as we moved. Just that it was “old,” that it was “buried,” and that every Hound hears it eventually. A whisper beneath the chaos. A voice that doesn’t belong to the Collector—or maybe precedes her.We traveled northeast. The world around us warped slowly the closer we got. Buildings leaned in strange directions, like pulled by gravity that wasn’t ours. Birds didn’t fly overhead. No animals moved through the brush. It was silence without peace.After two days of walking, we found it.Not with our eyes. With our bones.A pressure. A thrumming. The feeling of standing over something vast and hollow beneath your feet, like the earth might cave in any second and drop you into oblivion.Ash stopped near the ruins of an old observatory, half-collapsed and consumed by vines.“This is it,” he said.I frowned. “It’s a ruin.”“It’s a mask. The Well doesn’t need a place. It needs a wound. This building just happened t

I should have been afraid.The sky above the ruins of Chicago had turned a violent bruise-purple, and thunder rippled like a low growl from something slouching ever closer. Every instinct screamed that this was bigger than anything I could face, bigger than anything the Collector had prepared me for. But fear? It had burned out of me long ago—back when I first died, when I learned the afterlife came with contracts.What I felt now wasn’t fear.It was purpose.Ash walked beside me in silence. Reyes moved ahead, barking orders into her radio, directing units to evacuate the northern districts, to seal the Hollow, to prep fallback bunkers. But even as the soldiers scrambled and the machinery of survival clanked into motion, I felt it—pressing, watching, circling.The first of the forgotten Hounds had awoken.Not just Ash. Not just me.There were others.The Architect had said it plainly—our names were code, not memory. John, Ash, the others... we were experiments, forged in the earliest