​Chapter 23. Natural Selection

The sharp, almost forgotten sound of a phone ringing shattered the silence of the empty apartment like an alarm.

Eliza, finally tearing herself away from her strange, alien reflection, walked out of the bathroom and picked up the phone. The screen lit up with a name: Miller. Her chief. Probably another interrogation.

“Dahmer.”

“Liz,” the captain’s voice carried relief. “Good news. You know Dan came out of the coma a couple of days ago?”

Dan. ‘After massive blood loss and surgery, he was placed in a medically induced coma to stabilize his condition’ — that’s what the doctor had told her. They hadn’t let her into the ICU. She hadn’t thought about him since.

“He gave his statement,” Miller continued. “Fully confirmed your version. Armed assault, self-defense, all according to protocol. His testimony was the last thing the commission was waiting for. The internal investigation is closed, and all charges are dropped.”

Staring at her reflection in the window, she remained silent.

“And one more thing...” the captain added. “Given his testimony and your bravery... you’re being reinstated and transferred to Homicide. Honestly, I don’t quite understand how this happened... Normally, with our bureaucracy, this would take ages. But... you’re a detective now. Take today off, and tomorrow stop by the precinct for your new badge.”

She had wanted to die. How absurd that seemed now.

The memories of the bridge — the cold pistol against her temple, the black, beckoning water of the canal — had finally dissolved. There was no broken woman anymore, no one who saw no other way out. She, Detective Eliza Dahmer, was alive.

She hadn’t been given a second chance — she’d been handed a new game with new rules, and she was ready to cross any line to win it.

That girl... just a mistake. A statistical error. It happens.

This thought, once monstrous enough to make her sick, now sounded perfectly logical. This was war. Not the one news anchors scream about, but the real kind — the daily war against filth, violence, and crime devouring this city from within. And in war, there are always casualties. Collateral damage.

It wasn’t her fault that the girl ended up in the line of fire. It wasn’t her fault that the girl’s parents chose to live in a neighborhood where drugs were sold and gunshots were just background noise. They made their choice. The girl was the result of that choice.

Which meant she had only herself to blame.

Natural selection. The strong survive, the weak perish. Frankie had been weak and stupid. The girl had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And she, Eliza, had survived — had even grown stronger. So she had been right.

She looked at her own reflection, and the image of the smiling girl from the photograph — the one that had haunted her for weeks — dimmed, lost its clarity, dissolved into a meaningless smear. In its place emerged her own face — new, asymmetrical.

In the afternoon, she went to that same bridge on Seaport Boulevard. Despair was gone for good, leaving only resolve. The city lived its ordinary, noisy life; cars rushed past, people hurried along their routes. The world, hostile and alien just yesterday, had turned into a stage set.

In the middle of the bridge, she stopped, pulled the gun from her pocket — the one she had bought for that single purpose. The metal chilled her palm. She looked at it with a smirk, as if it were a relic from a past life that no longer belonged to her, a life that had belonged to another, weaker woman.

With a short, careless motion, she hurled it over the railing. The gun flashed in the sunlight and vanished into the water without leaving even a ripple. Her past no longer mattered to her.

In the evening, she stopped by a small, decent shop in South Boston and bought a bottle of Macallan — to properly celebrate her promotion. She’d be back. She would become the best detective in this city. She would prove to everyone that the rules are written by people like her.

She would go home, drink to her new life, and go to bed.

And she would dream.

She looked at her reflection — the new one, slightly asymmetrical, with one darkened pupil. A sudden, desperate urge struck her to see what lay beneath that skin. She raised a hand to her face, hooked a fingernail under the edge of the skin at her chin, and pulled upward.

The skin came off easily, like a thin mask, with a sticky, wet peeling sound. Beneath it there were no muscles, no bone. She peeled off the entire right half of her face, and it hung there, attached only at the hairline like a torn, blood-soaked rag.

The left half remained the same — human, frightened. But the right... the right had changed. Beneath the skin was dark, scaled flesh, shimmering like oil in a puddle. The eye socket was empty, but deep inside a small red light burned. From her forehead, erupting from the flesh, a black, curved horn slowly grew with a grinding crack.

Everything vanished, and she found herself in another dream.

She was riding in a sterile, white, silent elevator. Beside her stood a small girl of about seven, with two pale braids. Eliza recognized her — the child she had killed.

But the girl wasn’t angry. She looked at Eliza with those glassy eyes and said calmly:

“Mom asked me to tell you it’s time to begin. You have to meet with Damian Lanier.”

Eliza said nothing; her body refused to obey her, paralyzed by terror and by the sheer unreality of what was happening.

“He has to transfer a hundred million to your account,” the girl continued in the same flat, lifeless voice. “And he must establish a new company. For that, he will give you an entire floor in his tower. Mom says you know what to do next.”

The elevator stopped, and the doors slid open without a sound. Beyond them lay a black, endless void.

“She’s waiting,” the girl whispered and stepped into the void, disappearing within it.

Eliza woke up in her bed. The pillow was wet with sweat. She jerked upright, breathing hard, and scanned the room. Morning sunlight — a rare thing for Boston — seeped through the grimy windows. An empty bottle on the table, the sound of cars outside.

A dream. Another bad, drunken dream. Like the one yesterday.

Her head spun, and she swayed. The demonic face, the elevator, the dead girl-messenger... A mind poisoned by alcohol and guilt could produce far stranger visions. She walked into the kitchen to pour herself some water — and on the table lay a sheet torn from a notebook.

On it, in her own handwriting — slightly crooked from haste — were an address and a time:

Top of the Hub, Prudential Tower, 8:00 p.m.

She didn’t remember writing it.

With an unpleasant feeling tightening in her chest, she went to the nightstand where her old Nokia lay and opened the call log. One outgoing call. Yesterday, at 9:11 p.m. — she’d already been asleep then. An unfamiliar number.

Her heart slammed against her ribs — once, twice — stumbling out of rhythm. Without thinking, she pressed “call.” After the first ring, a calm, professional female voice answered:

“Lanier’s reception.”

Eliza said nothing, unsure what to say.

“Hello?” The voice on the other end remained polite, but insistent.

“I... I think I dialed the wrong number,” Eliza muttered.

“One moment.” There was a rustle of papers as the woman checked something. “Are you Detective Dahmer?”

Her lips, as if they belonged to someone else, answered for her.

“Yes.”

“Everything is confirmed, Detective,” the woman said. “Mr. Lanier will expect you today at eight. Do not be late.”

The line cut off. Eliza lowered the phone.

Everything had fallen back into place — but at what cost? And was that cost even real?

She picked up the note from the table again. Her handwriting. A call she didn’t remember making. Could it be some kind of sleepwalking episode? But sleepwalkers don’t make phone calls arranging meetings with one of the most influential men in the world.

What was she supposed to trust — the nightmare or the waking world?

But she couldn’t stay in that apartment any longer. She needed to push thoughts of Lanier aside. First — the precinct and the badge. She would cling to this new, gifted reality for as long as she possibly could.

The drive to the station was a mess. Traffic. The whole city seemed stuck on I-93. The car jerked forward a meter at a time, horns blaring all around. A typical bleak, irritating morning.

Eliza sat there, her foot pressing the brake pedal to the floor, feeling a dull, helpless anger simmering inside her. She had just gotten her life back, and now she was forced to sit in this metal box because of hundreds of other people who also needed to get somewhere. She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined an empty road. Clear. So she could drive without stopping.

When she opened her eyes, everything had changed.

The traffic was gone. The cars that had been packed bumper-to-bumper in front of her had vanished. The road ahead was completely empty, the roar of horns replaced by silence.

Her heart leapt to her throat, beating hard enough to choke her. The rearview mirror showed nothing. Someone had carved out a piece of reality and left a clear corridor just for her.

She had done this. She didn’t know how — but she knew it came from her. From her desire.

She suddenly remembered those ridiculous books her mother sometimes brought home. Bright, tacky covers with titles like Tell the Universe Your Wish and It Will Hear You or Quantum Physics for Manifesting Your Dreams. Nonsense for desperate housewives.

She had always laughed at them. But after what had just happened — she pictured an empty road, and the road cleared.

So the world wasn’t a hard, fixed thing. It was more like... clay. And she had left her handprint on it.

The thought was more terrifying than any nightmare, yet at the same time it gave her a sweet, dizzying rush of power.

She stepped on the gas. The car rolled forward, gliding down her own personal road, free of everyone else. Eliza drove, her mind completely blank. She wasn’t thinking about the past or the future. Only the empty street ahead and the steady hum of the engine.

The city was dead.

It wasn’t a slow realization — it hit her suddenly, undeniably. The cars were gone. The noise of the city had vanished. The sidewalks were empty. All the buildings — offices, shops, apartment blocks — watched her with black, hollow windows.

She was driving through an utterly empty, dead Boston.

Soon she saw her. Ahead, in the middle of the empty road, walked a lone figure. A little girl of about seven, with two pale braids, wearing a simple white dress.

Eliza hit the brakes, stopping a few yards away. The girl turned, lifted her hand, and pointed somewhere past Eliza’s shoulder, toward the downtown skyline. Eliza understood immediately — she was pointing at Lanier Tower.

And in the next heartbeat, the world snapped back.

The city came alive again. Cars reappeared around her, and the driver behind her honked angrily. Eliza flinched — the girl was gone.

But she was already close. Only a couple of blocks left.

She walked into the precinct, and the world that had been closed to her yesterday opened its doors again. Buzzing lights, the smell of coffee, familiar faces. Now she looked at it all differently.

“Detective Dahmer.” Captain Miller stepped up to her and shook her hand firmly. “Welcome back. We’re glad everything was resolved.”

The other cops — the same ones who avoided her yesterday — came up to her now, patting her shoulder, smiling.

“Listen, Liz, congratulations on the promotion!”

“Good job not letting him get away.”

Not a word about the girl.

Fake, friendly faces, words, smiles. She accepted their congratulations, nodded politely, even tried to smile back. Yesterday they saw her as a problem, a killer. Today — she was a hero. What had changed? The girl hadn’t come back to life. Time hadn’t rewound.

Nothing had changed except for one piece of paper. A piece of paper — that was what controlled them.

Someone up there, in an important office, had signed a report. And that signature changed their reality. The paper gave them a command. Yesterday, the command was “ignore.” Today — “congratulate.”

So it wasn’t about the fact that she had killed a child. Not about morality, not about justice. It was about the system that ordered them to obey. The system says “turn away” — and they turn away. The system says “smile” — and they smile.

They weren’t people but slaves.

All of them — her colleagues, the captain, the woman who had cursed her — lived inside a cage built from someone else’s rules. Their “good” and “evil” weren’t their own choices. They were instructions handed to them. They condemned her not because they thought her action was wrong, but because they were told to think so. They praised her not because they believed she was a hero, but because a new order had arrived.

Slaves to morality, to the code, to fear of the system.

And she? She had stepped over guilt, morality, and the law. She had paid the price for her freedom and now stood on the other side. No longer a cog in their mechanism, she finally belonged to herself.

And with that realization came an endless loneliness — and an endless weightlessness.

She had to spend the day drowning in paperwork.

Eliza received her new badge — shiny, heavy, engraved with “Detective.” Then she gathered her few belongings from the old patrol locker and moved them into her new office. Calling it an office was generous — it was more like a glass-partitioned corner in the noisy, humming beehive of Homicide. But it was her place.

The bureaucracy began. New access protocols. A briefing on database procedures. Dozens of digital and paper forms she had to fill out. She sat at her new desk, mechanically typing in data, listening to the hum of voices and the chirping of communicators, and felt like an actress playing the role of Detective Dahmer.

None of it was real. It was just a set piece.

The dream was real. The asymmetrical face in the mirror was real. The address and time on the note were real.

She knew she would go to that meeting with Lanier. More than that — she wanted to go. This whole world — the precinct, the colleagues, the protocols — was a cage they’d briefly opened for her, only to lock her back inside, repainting the bars. The meeting with Lanier, the command from... the Mother — that was the way out. The real way.

Night awaited her.