Christians with guns. Catholics with guns. Protestants with guns. Mennonites with guns. A full liturgical calendar of calibers. Apparently “love thy enemy” was a rough translation of “center mass, steady squeeze.” Nothing like a sermon that ends with an altar call and a ballistic trajectory.

Mrs. Millar plays guardian angel with a switchblade smile. She tells a wanted Lucas that Deputy Anna left him in her care—adorable, if it weren’t a lie sharpened for maximum bleed. Anna didn’t even know Lucas was skulking around the Bonnie farm. Mrs. Millar’s not sheltering him; she’s rearranging his mind furniture, one gaslight at a time.

Nikolai drags Henry through the ruptured zipper of reality to a sanctuary: a church turned mausoleum, bombed to memory, his family baptized in shrapnel. Comforting, sure—if your idea of therapy is curling up on the ashes of everything you loved. Grief as weighted blanket; trauma as home address.

Henry spits the truth—“I know you took my dad”—and Nikolai answers like a man picking teeth with grave markers: he “takes a lot of people.” What a tender euphemism for abduction and unmarked endings. He withholds the only confession that matters, because monsters prefer you to guess what color their teeth were.

Meanwhile, politics puts on its Sunday best. The late Chief Dale—drug trafficker turned station mascot—gets a plaque because his widow asked nicely and local power wags its tail on command. “Police discretion” here means the justice system kneeling to a photo-op, polishing brass while the rot takes root.

Clear Tech, that multinational R\&D confessional, keeps the faith by torturing teleporters until spacetime coughs up data. Think Trask Industries with a corporate wellness program—stretch, hydrate, vivisect. They don’t research people; they disassemble possibilities and file what screams.

So of course the experiments happen on private land, where ethics go to scream off-mic. A “proper care” corporation, fenced in by NDAs, incubates the next generation of nightmares: not quite human, not quite animal, entirely proprietary. The fields hum with generators and something else—something that remembers being a person just long enough to hate you for noticing.