DAY TWENTYFOUR 21:00PM

To Everything There Is A Time

Stone turned off the ignition. Three blocks ahead of him, the skyscraper rose up into the night. The low clouds were glowing with the dull-orange of reflected light from the city. It looked the sky was about to combust. 

He could feel the fire inside him. Looking at the tower. The smooth black glass. The logo of the LEGACY Corporation. He was burning inside.

What terrible things were happening inside right now? The terrible things he had read about on the laptop. And then things Max had shown him yesterday. 

He didn’t regret contacting him.  He already knew the world was a bad place – the job had taught him that – but Max had shown him just how bad. Stone wanted to know, though: it’s why he had become a detective. So he could learn the true ways of the world.

They were so much stranger and so much darker than he ever imagined. 

Maybe that’s what started the fire inside him. Or maybe it had been smoldering for years. Too many years of crime scenes, of blood and ashes, of the powerful abusing the weak, of the system brutalizing the wounded.

So it had all come down to an open investigation and a laptop, a mind-bending conspiracy and a man named Max. 

He knew how things really worked now, what sorts of crimes were really being committed. Entire lives and worlds used in nameless agendas. Experiments, violations, nightmares. Secrets that could save the world and make fairy tales come true hoarded and corrupted for greed and terror.

So now he had to do something about it. 

He turned the key. The car started. The flames in him flickered.

The car moved down the street towards the skyscraper. 

Stone glanced at the cell phone in the passenger seat. Riveta’s number was cued up.

His sidearm was beside it. The fire surged. 

He approached the tower.