EPISODE 6: THE WATCHERS ## CHAPTER 1: THREE YEARS LATER November 12th, 1995. Jessica Chen passed the bar exam on her first try. She got a job at a firm in Chicago. She moved into an apartment with David, who had proposed in June, and they were planning a spring wedding. From the outside, her life looked perfect. No one knew that she drove to Cedar Valley once a month to check on the seal. --- ## CHAPTER 2: THE NETWORK They had built something in the years since Derek's sacrifice. Not an organization—nothing that formal. More like a network. People who knew, people who watched, people who would sound the alarm if anything changed. Marcus was a detective now, assigned to a district that just happened to include the Cedar Valley area. He'd convinced his captain that the region needed regular patrols, citing crime statistics he'd manufactured himself. Tamara had become an art professor at a community college. Her paintings still showed visions of the underground, but now they served as early warning systems—her subconscious alerting her to shifts in the Devourer's sleep. Brandon had disappeared for two years after Derek's death. When he returned, he wouldn't say where he'd been, only that he'd "learned more about the mouths." He set up a monitoring station in a house...