Smokes and Shadows: What lies beneath

When the explosion hit, it wasn’t just a blast.

It was a message.

Four thousand miles away and exactly simultaneously, a fireball erupted under Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue Line—killing twenty-nine and injuring over two hundred. The President was awakened mid-sentence during a NATO briefing. London’s Prime Minister was evacuated to an undisclosed bunker. Sirens echoed across both cities as phones buzzed, social feeds lit up, and fear gripped the world like a vice.

But that was only the beginning.

Two hours later, a video uploaded to CNN’s international bureau inbox.

No voice. No face. Just a digital waveform and a synthetic voice, genderless and cold:

“This was a warning. The next attacks will make these look like accidents. Five cities. Five catastrophes. No force on Earth can stop what comes next. You will all choke in your lies. The reckoning begins.”

It was signed only: “Veritas.”

And somewhere, far from the blast sites—in a cluttered Chicago apartment lined with case files, coffee cups, and crime scene photos—Detective Sophia Blake turned up the volume and reached for her badge.

She didn’t know it yet, but the missing girl she’d been chasing for three years was about to blow this whole thing wide open.

And nothing—not Interpol, not the CIA, not even the White House—was ready for what she was about to find.