Briar Cove

Marcus Redfield

**Elena Vance** has worked at The Threshold for twelve years. Her job: monitoring for breaches and coordinating containment. She's good at it—clinical, efficient, detached. She's seen reality fold in on itself, watched people forget impossible things they witnessed, helped smooth over the seams. She believes in the mission: consensus must be maintained, or everything falls apart. Then her daughter starts drawing things that haven't happened yet. At first, Elena rationalizes. Children have active imaginations. The drawings are coincidences. But the details are too precise, the events too specific. Her daughter isn't predicting the future—she's *choosing* it. Believing it into existence with the unshakeable conviction only a child possesses. According to Threshold protocol, Elena knows exactly what must be done with individuals who can unilaterally reshape reality. She's ordered it herself, dozens of times. Now she has to decide: protect the consensus that keeps the world stable, or protect her daughter from the organization Elena has served her entire adult life. As Elena digs deeper, she discovers her daughter may not be an anomaly at all—but the result of deliberate manipulation. Someone is awakening Believers. And Elena's daughter might be the first success in a plan to unmake everything The Threshold has built.