The VA office door closed behind me with a dull click that said nothing and promised less. I stood for a moment, papers clutched in my scarred hand, and let the Pennsylvania winter air cut painfully into my lungs. Across the cracked parking lot, my car waited—the only vehicle in a sea of empty spaces, as abandoned as this town and as I felt. The papers crinkled as my fingers tightened.

  Sophie would have said something gentle about this moment. Something about endings and beginnings: but Sophie wasn't here anymore, except as ash in an urn in my trunk, and I'd run out of gentle words when I ran out of sister.

  The sky hung low and slate-gray, pressed down like a lid on Harlow. No snow yet. Just an empty promise of something that might clean this place, never delivered. My gaze drifted up to the VA building's facade, where paint peeled away in strips that curled like dying fingers. The American flag hung limp on its pole. Even patriotism couldn't muster a breeze today.

  "You'll want to keep those papers, Mr. Carrow." The counselor's voice echoed in my head. What was his name? Didn't matter. Another soft-handed man in a government-issue chair who'd never held a rifle or watched the light leave someone's eyes. "For your records."

  My records. As if bureaucracy could file away what I'd seen. What I'd done. What had been done to Sophie while I was gone.

  I looked down at the papers—official validation of my service, my injuries, my right to be broken. My thumb brushed over the embossed seal at the bottom. Then I crumpled them into a ball and shoved them deep into my jacket pocket. The action felt good. Simple. Something I could control.

  They finally believed me. Disability Compensation. Eighteen hundred bucks a month. Was that what a life was worth? Lump sum back pay—twenty-eight grand in retro. It was enough to prove the system could count if you wore the correct uniform. Sophie never wore one, despite her only adult job being as a public school teacher. So Sophie never counted.

  I walked toward my car, boots scraping against asphalt pockmarked with holes. Each step measured, heel to toe, how they taught us to move quietly through hostile territory—old habits. The army had drilled precision into me, and precision was the only religion that had stuck.

  My '98 Civic waited, rust eating at the wheel wells like a slow cancer. The blue paint had faded to the color of a bruise. Sophie used to joke that it was my "chariot," pronounced with mock grandeur, that always made me almost smile. Now it was just metal and mechanics, a tool to get from pointless place to pointless place.

  The keys jingled in my hand—the only sound besides my breathing in the vacant lot. I unlocked the trunk. It opened with a reluctant creak, protesting its use like every other damn thing in this town. Inside, past the spare tire and the emergency kit I still kept methodically organized, sat her urn.

  Simple. Metal. Utilitarian. We couldn't afford the polished marble ones with doves or angels or whatever the fuck they put on containers meant to hold what's left when a person becomes past tense. This one was brushed aluminum, no markings. Sophie wouldn't have cared. "When I'm dead, I'm dead," she'd said during one of those nights when the pain kept her awake. "Put me in a coffee can if you want."

  I hadn't, though. I'd scraped together enough for this. It was clean at least. Dignified in its plainness.

  My fingers hovered over it before making contact. The metal was cold—colder than the air around us. I traced the seam where the lid met the base, a perfect circle containing all that remained of the one person who had ever really known me.

  "Hey, Soph," I whispered.

  The words fell into the trunk's darkness and disappeared. No answer came back. Just the distant sound of a train whistle from tracks that wouldn't see a passenger service again in this lifetime.

  Twenty-eight. That's how old she was. Twenty-eight and brilliant and full of stupid, stubborn hope even as the cancer ate through her like acid through paper. Twenty-eight and denied treatment because of fine print and bottom lines. Twenty-eight and gone while I watched, powerless, my government-issued murder skills useless against an enemy that came dressed in suits and spoke in terms like "pre-existing condition" and "coverage limitation."

  My hand curled around the urn, lifted it slightly, feeling its weight. Not heavy enough. How could everything that made Sophie herself—her laugh, her thoughts, the way she'd tap her pencil against her teeth when thinking—be reduced to something I could lift with one hand?

  I set it back down carefully, arranging it so it wouldn't slide during the drive. Then I slammed the trunk shut with enough force to make the whole car shudder. The sound echoed across the parking lot, bouncing off the VA building's dirty windows and returning to me like a taunt.

  Stillness fell again. Heavy. Pressing. I didn't move from behind the car. Where was there to go? My apartment was just a place to sleep. No job waited for me. No purpose. Sophie had been my purpose—taking care of her, fighting for her treatment, holding her hand as machines beeped and nurses spoke in hushed tones.

  Now there was just silence and me standing in it.

  The counselor had talked about "finding meaningful engagement." Words that meant nothing in a town where the factories stood like mausoleums and the only growth industry was the opioid trade. Harlow had been dying before I left for the army. Now it was a corpse that hadn't accepted its death.

  Kind of like me.

  I scanned the parking lot—habit from deployment, checking for threats, exit routes, anomalies. Nothing but empty spaces where other veterans' cars should have been. Maybe they'd found their "meaningful engagement" elsewhere. Perhaps they were curled up in bedrooms with blinds drawn. Maybe they'd put guns in their mouths rather than face another day of this hollowness.

  I couldn't blame them if they had.

  The wind picked up, cutting through my field jacket. I didn't zip it higher. The cold felt honest at least. Clean. It moved through the empty spaces in my chest where grief had carved out rooms.

  Sophie would have hated seeing me like this. Standing frozen beside my car like some goddamn statue to indecision. "Move or don't move, Dust," she would have said, "but for God's sake, pick one."

  I pulled my keys from my pocket and walked to the driver's side. The door opened with the same protesting creak as the trunk. I slid inside and put the key in the ignition but didn't turn it.

  Instead, I sat in the silence, my hands on the wheel, and stared through the windshield at the building where men with clean fingernails had just stamped my service-connected disabilities as official. Behind me, in the trunk, my sister waited in her metal container. Both of us were going nowhere.

  "What now?" I asked the empty car.

  No answer came. I hadn't expected one. Not yet.

  I drove three blocks from the VA before the car felt too small, too contained, like a coffin on wheels. Pulling into an empty spot outside what used to be Harlow's only bookstore, I cut the engine and stepped out. Walking seemed right—purposeless movement for a purposeless man. The afternoon light was already fading, bleeding out over the horizon like Harlow was dying slowly. Main Street stretched before me, a museum of American decline that no one would pay to visit. I moved down the cracked sidewalk with measured steps, my hands in my pockets, my breath clouding in front of me—visible proof I was still alive, converting oxygen to carbon dioxide like a good biological machine, even if I couldn't remember why that mattered anymore.

  The storefronts lined up like broken teeth in a meth addict's smile. Holloway's Hardware—boarded up. The diner, closed on Tuesdays, had somehow stretched into three years. The movie theater with its marquee advertising films from two summers ago, the letters faded and askew. Sun-bleached "For Lease" signs hung in windows like surrender flags, their phone numbers leading to disconnected lines and voicemails never checked.

  A plastic bag tumbled down the sidewalk, caught in a gust of wind. I watched it dance across the street, a ghost of commerce. When I'd shipped out seventeen years ago, Harlow had been sick but still breathing. Now it was on life support, kept alive by whatever meager tax base the county could extract from the remaining residents. The kind of town politicians pointed to when they needed examples of the forgotten America, then promptly forgot again once the cameras stopped rolling.

  I passed the Dollar General—one of the few stores still operating—its fluorescent lights harsh against the gray afternoon. A young mother struggled out the door, plastic bags in one hand, dragging a screaming toddler with the other. Our eyes met briefly. She looked away first. I was used to that. Something about me made people uncomfortable now. Maybe it was the way I moved, too deliberate, too aware. Perhaps it was something deeper they sensed, the hollowness that Sophie's death had carved into me.

  Three blocks east, I approached Harlow Elementary. The chain-link fence surrounding it was new—installed after the closure to keep out vandals and teenagers looking for a place to get high. Behind it, the redbrick building stood silent, windows dark. Sophie had taught third grade here for four years. Room 109. She'd decorated the walls with her students' art projects and quotes from books they'd read together.

  "These kids are why we fight," she'd told me once over the phone while I was deployed. "They're why there has to be a future worth having."

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  Now the school was empty, victims of budget cuts and declining enrollment. The children bused forty minutes to the consolidated school in Millerton. Yet another small death in a town full of them.

  I stopped at the fence, my fingers curling around the cold metal links. Through the diamond-shaped gaps, I could see the playground where Sophie had monitored recess, laughing as kids climbed, swung, and chased each other. I remembered visiting her classroom once, after I'd come back, how the kids had stared at me in my uniform, how Sophie had beamed with pride introducing her big brother, the soldier. How simple everything had seemed then, before the diagnosis, before the bills, before I'd learned that the enemy wasn't always someone you could shoot.

  A scuffling sound drew my attention. In the alley beside the school, a stray dog—some pit bull mix with ribs showing through matted fur—had knocked over a garbage can and was nosing through the spilled contents. The animal froze when it spotted me, ears flattening against its skull.

  I crouched slowly, extending my hand, palm down. "Easy," I murmured.

  The dog watched me warily, hunger warring with fear in its eyes. Something in them reminded me of men I'd seen in combat zones—that desperate calculation of risk versus survival. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a protein bar I'd forgotten about. Unwrapping it, I broke off a piece and tossed it gently toward the animal.

  The dog snatched it up, retreating a few steps before devouring it. I tossed another piece, a little closer this time.

  "Not gonna hurt you," I said, though I knew the words meant nothing. Actions were the only language that carried weight.

  After finishing the bar, the dog seemed to consider approaching me, taking a tentative step forward. Then a car backfired somewhere down the street. The animal bolted, disappearing behind the school building.

  Just as well. I had nothing else to offer. Not to a stray dog. Not to myself.

  I stood, brushing my hands on my jeans, and continued walking. The movement felt mechanical—left foot, right foot, measuring my pace unconsciously as we'd been taught. Thirty inches per step. A hundred and twenty steps per minute. The rhythm of marching drums still embedded in my muscles four years after discharge.

  The pharmacy came into view at the corner of Main and Elm. Or rather, what had once been Harlow Pharmacy and was now an empty shell, its large windows covered with brown paper from the inside. This was where Sophie had waited, week after week, for medications that never arrived, where the pharmacist with sad eyes had explained about supply issues, insurance rejections, and prior authorizations needed.

  I stopped across the street, staring at the faded sign above the door. How many hours did Sophie spend in that waiting area, filling out forms and calling insurance representatives? Her face was growing more drawn with each visit. How many times had I stood beside her, my fists clenched as she was told to come back next week, to try another form, to speak to a different department?

  "It's okay, Dust," she'd say afterward, though we both knew it wasn't. "We'll figure it out."

  But we hadn't figured it out. The system had won, grinding her down until there was nothing left but pain, and then not even that.

  My breathing had quickened without my noticing. I forced it to slow, counting inhales and exhales like my platoon sergeant had taught us to do before firing. Four in. Four hold. Four out. Four hold. Repeat until the crosshairs stopped shaking.

  A man in a postal worker's uniform approached from the opposite direction. I recognized him vaguely—he'd delivered mail to Sophie's apartment. He nodded at me, opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to think better of it. Instead, he gave a small, awkward half-salute and hurried past.

  That was how most people in Harlow interacted with me now. Brief acknowledgments followed by hasty retreats. I'd become a walking reminder of tragedy, systems that failed, and the silent suffering behind closed doors throughout the town. No one knew what to say to the man whose sister had died because she couldn't afford to live.

  No one except Sophie had ever known what to say to me anyway.

  The light was fading faster now, afternoon bleeding into evening. Street lamps flickered on, casting pools of sickly yellow light on the sidewalk. I'd walked nearly a mile without conscious destination, but I realized my route had carved a path between landmarks of Sophie's short life—the school where she'd taught, the pharmacy that had failed her, the coffee shop where she'd graded papers on weekends.

  I'd mapped her absence through my footsteps, measuring the negative space she'd left behind.

  A cold wind picked up, cutting through my jacket. I didn't turn back toward my car. Instead, I kept walking, letting my feet carry me toward the edge of town where the abandoned factories stood. The sun was setting now, painting the western sky in colors too beautiful for a place like this. Sophie would have appreciated it anyway. She'd always found beauty in the breaks between ugliness.

  I moved silently through the gathering darkness, another shadow in a town full of them. Time passed.

  Night fell like a funeral shroud over Harlow when I parked at the overlook. Below me stretched the industrial district—or what was left of it. Steel mills and factories stood in dark silhouette against the night sky, their smokestacks rising like tombstones for the American dream. I cut the engine but left the key in the ignition. The dashboard clock's pale green numbers read 11:47 PM. No one came here anymore except teenagers looking to get drunk or get laid, and even they had mostly abandoned this ghost town. It was just me, the hollow buildings, and the silence pressing in from all sides. And Sophie, of course. I'd moved her urn from the trunk to the passenger seat. Seemed wrong to keep her locked away in the dark.

  The valley below had once hummed with industry, three shifts running around the clock, men and women streaming in and out of those gates like blood through arteries. Now it was a necropolis of rust and broken windows. Moonlight glinted off shattered glass and puddles of stagnant water. Nature was already reclaiming what humans had surrendered, vines creeping up walls, weeds pushing through cracked concrete. In another decade, you might not know these had been buildings at all.

  "Remember when Dad used to point down there and tell us that's where we'd work someday?" I asked the urn. "You always said you'd rather die than spend your life on an assembly line."

  The bitter irony of that childhood declaration wasn't lost on me. Sophie had escaped the factories only to be ground up by a different kind of machine—the healthcare system that had deemed her life less valuable than its profit margins.

  I didn't expect the urn to answer. Talking to it was a habit I'd developed in the weeks since her death. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it just emphasized the silence that followed.

  I leaned back against the seat, watching my breath fog the windshield. The night was cold enough that I should have kept the engine running for heat, but the silence felt necessary. Sacred, almost. Like a church for the godless.

  What was I doing here? Not just at this overlook, but in Harlow. In this life. The VA counselor had suggested "finding purpose" as if purpose were something you could stumble across like a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk. The army had given me purpose, however hollow it sometimes felt. Structure. Direction. A clear division between enemy and ally. Now there was just... nothing. Days bleeding into nights, breathing because my body hadn't figured out how to stop.

  I could leave Harlow. Nothing kept me here except Sophie's ghost and memories that cut like glass. But where would I go? What would I do? The world beyond these hills seemed vast and pointless, full of people living their small lives, oblivious to how fragile their existence was, how quickly systems could determine they were expendable.

  My fingers drummed against the steering wheel, a nervous habit from combat days. Three taps, pause, two taps. Repeat—the rhythm of waiting for something to happen while knowing nothing would.

  "What would you tell me to do, Soph?" I asked the silent urn.

  She'd always been the one with answers. With hope. With that stubborn belief that things could get better if you fought hard enough, cared enough. That belief had sustained her through the diagnosis, through the first rounds of treatment, through the denial letters and the appeals. It had abandoned her only at the very end, when the pain became too much and the future too short to matter.

  I'd lost my belief long before that. Maybe in the desert, watching a village burn because of coordinates I'd called in. Maybe in the sterile hospital hallway where a doctor with practiced sympathy explained why Sophie's treatment options had "unfortunately been exhausted." Maybe belief had never been something I possessed to begin with.

  My phone sat face-up on the dashboard where I'd placed it after checking for messages that never came. A habit, like so many others, that structured my days now. Check phone. Eat something. Sleep when possible. Repeat until death or purpose, whichever came first.

  Without warning, the screen illuminated.

  Not the usual white glow of a notification. This was different—a deep, electric blue that seemed to pulse with an internal rhythm. No incoming call icon. No message alert. Just that unnatural blue washed over the car's interior, casting strange shadows across the dashboard, my hands, and Sophie's urn.

  I stared at it, unmoving. In the military, unexpected things were rarely good things. They meant ambush, equipment failure, or intelligence that had gone bad. My hand hovered over the phone, not quite touching it.

  The screen changed. Text began to appear, one letter at a time, as if being typed by invisible hands:

  Y-O-U A-R-E O-B-S-E-R-V-E-D.

  I pulled my hand back. The blue light continued to pulse, almost like breathing. More text appeared:

  Y-O-U A-R-E C-H-O-S-E-N.

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. This wasn't a glitch or a virus. Something about the deliberate pace of the letters, the quality of the light—too vibrant, too alive—suggested intelligence behind it. I glanced at the signal bars. None. No service here at the overlook, never had been.

  Y-O-U A-R-E A-U-T-H-O-R-I-Z-E-D.

  "Authorized for what?" I asked aloud, my voice sounding strange in the confined space of the car.

  No answer came except the next line of text, appearing with the same measured pace:

  D-O Y-O-U C-O-N-S-E-N-T T-O C-O-R-R-E-C-T-I-O-N?

  The blue light intensified, casting my shadow against the passenger window. It stretched and distorted, no longer matching my outline, as if something else were taking shape.

  My first instinct was to throw the phone out the window, to drive away from this overlook and never return. But beneath that instinct was something deeper, something that had been kindling since I'd watched Sophie take her last breath.

  Rage.

  Not the hot, explosive kind that erupts and subsides. This was colder, more focused. A clarity of purpose that had been absent since I'd returned from war to find my sister dying and no enemy to fight.

  I looked at the phone again. The cursor blinked after the question mark, waiting. Patient. Certain.

  What did "correction" mean? Who or what was offering it? The rational part of my brain cycled through explanations—elaborate prank, government surveillance, psychotic break. None felt right.

  My eyes shifted to Sophie's urn, silent in the passenger seat. The blue light played across its metallic surface, making it seem almost alive. What would she say about this? She'd probably tell me to be careful, ask questions, and consider consequences.

  But Sophie was dead because no one had corrected anything.

  My finger hovered over the screen, caught between dismissal and curiosity. The blue light cast harsh shadows across my hollow features, transforming them into something I no longer recognized in mirrors. In that strange illumination, I saw myself not as I was—broken, drifting, purposeless—but as something else. Something with direction. With function.

  The text waited, patient and inevitable:

  D-O Y-O-U C-O-N-S-E-N-T T-O C-O-R-R-E-C-T-I-O-N?

  My finger trembled above the screen, muscle memory from a thousand trigger pulls warring with the frozen indecision that had characterized my life since Sophie's death.

  Below me, the dead factories stood witness. Around me, the night pressed in with all its empty promises. Beside me, my sister waited in her metal container.

  And before me, glowing with unnatural purpose, the question remained—offering something I couldn't name but recognized in the hollow pit where hope had once lived.

  Correction.

  For what had happened to Sophie.

  For what had happened to Harlow.

  For what had happened to me.

  My finger descended toward the screen, trailing through the blue light like a falling star.