THE CHRYSANTHEMUM CURSE

Outside the kitchen door, the night air hit Maya like a bucket of ice water.

She fell down the three wooden steps leading into the alley, her hands scraping against the gravel parking lot. Pain shot up her wrists, but she ignored it, scrambling to her feet and sprinting toward the tree line that bordered the edge of the Starlight Diner's property.

Behind her, she heard the heavy metallic CRACK of the kitchen door being kicked open off its hinges.

"Maya!" Vance's voice boomed through the fog, no longer a quiet whisper, but a harsh, authoritative bark that echoed off the damp brick walls of the diner. "There is nowhere to run! The county is locked down!"

Maya didn't look back. She plunged into the thick brush of the Blackwood Forest.

The pine needles tore at her bare arms and legs. The yellow floral dress, already ruined, caught on a jagged blackberry bramble, ripping open down the side, but she shoved her way through, the sharp thorns scoring deep red lines across her skin.

Her lungs felt like they were filled with crushed glass. Every breath tasted of ozone, wet pine, and her own metallic fear.

She knew the terrain was against her. Vance was trained, equipped with night-vision optics, and rested. She was a runaway, barefoot, starving, and armed with nothing but a stolen USB flash drive tucked into the elastic waistband of her underwear.

That drive contained the master key log for the Oakridge Sanatorium—and the video files proving that the "treatments" conducted in the basement were not medical procedures, but psychological erasure trials funded by a defense contractor.

And the man who owned that contractor... drove a white Volvo.

She crashed through a thicket of young birch trees, her feet sinking ankle-deep into the freezing mud of a dried-up creek bed. She fell again, rolling onto her back, staring up through the dense canopy of leaves at the pale, sickly moon.

She lay there, her chest heaving violently, listening to the forest.