Chapter 16

Andreas returned to the lair in the early hours, his body heavy with exhaustion. The warehouse was quiet, the dim light casting long shadows across the scattered equipment. Xae was gone, likely having gone home long before. Andreas moved slowly, his mind clouded with the weight of the night. He awkwardly removed the Zorro mask and hat, then hesitated. It wasn’t routine for him yet—he fumbled around, hunting for the correct places to put them back. Every motion felt stiff, as if the objects didn’t quite belong in his hands. Finally, after some searching, he managed to place them properly, knowing Xae would kill him if they weren’t stored just right.

With the mask and hat finally put away, Andreas collapsed onto the worn couch in the middle of the lair. The room felt vast and empty around him, the kind of quiet that made him feel more alone than usual. He leaned back, staring at the ceiling as his thoughts swirled together in a fog of fatigue. The adrenaline from the night had long since faded, leaving behind a heavy, hollow feeling in his chest. He wasn’t even sure what he was feeling anymore—just an overwhelming sense of pressure, like the weight of his new life was crushing down on him all at once. Slowly, the tension began to leak out, and without meaning to, he felt tears slipping down his face.

Andreas didn’t try to stop the tears. They came silently at first, but soon his shoulders shook as the sobs broke free. He buried his face in his hands, the weight of everything crashing over him—the danger, the isolation, the fear that he was losing control. For a while, he just let it happen, too exhausted to hold back any longer. It wasn’t until his breathing slowed and the tears dried on his cheeks that the overwhelming fatigue pulled him under. With his body curled on the couch, Andreas slipped into an uneasy sleep, the echoes of his sobs still lingering in the quiet warehouse.

The dream started gently, almost playfully, as Andreas found himself walking through a world that seemed familiar but not quite right. The colors were too bright, the streets too wide, and the people too tall. His childhood home appeared in the distance, but when he reached it, it shifted, twisting into a warped version of itself. Doors led to nowhere, and rooms were stretched out like a funhouse mirror. Familiar faces from his past came and went, but their features were exaggerated, almost cartoonish. Everything seemed mismatched, like a puzzle that couldn’t quite fit together. Yet, despite the strangeness, there was a whimsical quality to it all, as if the world was inviting him to play along.

As Andreas wandered through this surreal landscape, a large grey fox with moonlight silver eyes appeared at the edges of his vision. It didn’t approach him or speak, but its presence was constant, watching him silently from afar. No matter where he went, the fox was always there, observing. The dream continued to shift, pulling him through distorted versions of his memories. One moment, he was walking down a street, the next, he was back in the warehouse, but everything was stretched and warped, as if the walls were bending under some unseen force. The people around him spoke in singsong voices, their words rhyming and looping nonsensically, creating a rhythm that matched the strange world he was trapped in.

As the dream grew more disjointed, Andreas began to feel unsettled. What had started as whimsical was now growing darker, more frantic. The grey fox was still there, its silver eyes never leaving him. He tried to move faster, to escape the strange, shifting world around him, but the landscape warped with every step he took. He would run down a hallway only for it to stretch into infinity. He'd try to open a door, but it would dissolve into smoke in his hands. The rhymes became louder, more chaotic, twisting in his mind, the words overlapping, no longer playful but menacing. Everywhere he went, the fox followed, silent and still, its presence pressing down on him like a shadow.

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As the disorienting dreamscape tightened around him, Andreas' heart began to race. He ran harder, desperate to break free from the endless shifting hallways and strange figures, but no matter how fast he moved, the world continued to collapse in on itself. The rhymes that had filled the air suddenly shifted, their playful tone gone, replaced by something darker. "Help the children, little fox, help them trapped inside a box," the voices chanted in unison, their words echoing through his mind like a twisted riddle. The world around him darkened, the colors bleeding out into a deep, suffocating shadow. He felt like he was falling, the weight of the rhyme growing heavier with each repetition.

Suddenly, Andreas found himself in a dark, suffocating room. The walls seemed to close in around him, heavy and oppressive. Scattered on the floor were the children’s backpacks he had seen at the warehouse, each one lying still and untouched. His breath quickened as grotesque figures began to emerge from the shadows—twisted, distorted versions of the children who had owned those backpacks. Their faces were misshapen, their bodies bent at impossible angles, their hollow eyes filled with a silent, pleading sorrow. One of the children slowly looked up at him, its mouth barely moving as it whispered, “Help...” The word echoed around him, dragging out unnaturally in the thick, oppressive air. Andreas tried to move, but he was frozen, trapped in the nightmare, surrounded by the haunting figures of the children.

Andreas jolted awake, his body drenched in cold sweat, heart pounding in his chest. The image of the twisted children and their hollow eyes lingered in his mind, refusing to fade. He sat up on the couch, trying to steady his breathing, but the eerie rhyme from the dream echoed in his head: "Help the children, little fox, help them trapped inside a box." The words, seemingly nonsense, clung to him like a shadow, making his skin crawl. He wiped his face with his hands, but no matter how hard he tried to shake off the nightmare, the unsettling feeling wouldn’t let go.

Still shaken from the nightmare, Andreas reached for his phone, hoping for something to ground him in reality. His eyes scanned the screen, and there it was—a message from Sylvia. She had sent several photos from the raid, clear and detailed shots of Zorro in action. But Andreas noticed something strange: in each image, no matter how sharp the rest of the scene was, Zorro’s face was always blurred. It wasn’t the kind of blur that came from editing or bad focus; it looked as though, at the precise moment the picture was taken, only his face was in motion, obscuring his features. Sylvia, excited about her photos, didn’t seem to notice. “Four kids are safe, 20 Que members either dead or in custody,” her message continued. Andreas let out a long breath, feeling a mix of relief and unease.

After hanging up the mask and cape, Andreas turned his attention to the sword. He unsheathed it slowly, the blade catching the dim light as he inspected it. Despite the night's intense activities, the blade looked brand new, gleaming without a single scratch or smudge to suggest it had been used at all. As he ran his thumb along the edge, his eyes caught something he had never noticed before—etched into the blade near the hilt was the image of a fox, its eyes made from two small diamonds that shimmered faintly. Andreas frowned, flipping the blade over and finding the same image on the other side. He stared at it for a long moment, unsettled by the discovery. How had he never seen this before?

Andreas placed the sword carefully on its stand, the image of the fox and its diamond eyes still nagging at the back of his mind. It was strange—something so intricate, so deliberate, had always been there, yet he'd never noticed it until now. He sat back down on the couch, running a hand through his hair, trying to shake off the uneasy feeling. The dream, the blurred photos, the sword... it all felt connected somehow, though he couldn't quite put the pieces together. The sun was beginning to rise, casting faint streaks of light through the warehouse windows, pulling him out of his thoughts. He sat there for a moment, gathering himself, before finally deciding it was time to get up and go.

He threw on his sweatpants, sneakers, and hoodie, pulling them on with deliberate movements as if the routine might push the night’s madness further from his mind. Grabbing his keys, he stepped outside and locked the door behind him. The cold morning air hit him as he approached his Charger, the street still quiet in the early light. Slipping behind the wheel, he let the familiar hum of the engine calm him as he pulled out onto the empty streets. The city was waking up, but Andreas' mind remained clouded with the lingering mysteries of the night.