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12 July, 1951
0200 hours
Operation: Morningstar - York Base

"Frankie"

She opened her eyes. She was on her back, a clear expanse of sky overhead. A gentle smile inched over her lips. Her little brother's voice resonated in her ears, warm and familiar, and an affectionate protective feeling washed over her. But where was he?

"Frankie!"

His voice was nearer this time. She strained to sit up, but something pressed down against her chest, some unseen weight held her down. She heard breathing, gasping, cracking, and her smile faded, the warmth vanishing, replaced with a cold apprehension. Something was very wrong.
Slowly, she turned her head toward the sound, finding it difficult to move, but finally she could see him, knelt on the ground, his fists balled tightly in the grass beneath him. His body heaved, his face contorting as he gasped and groaned, his eyes held shut tightly, and his skin began to turn dark, bruised. "Frankie" he muttered, his voice catching in his throat. He was changing. His bones cracking, his muscles quivering, the colour draining from his skin, he could barely force the word to leave his lips. Tears streamed down Frankie's face as she tried desperately to reach out to him, to make herself move, to say his name, anything.
Finally, he collapsed to the ground, breathing hard, wheezing, sputtering, before his body, a mass of slick, grey skin, stopped moving.

At once, the weight was lifted from Frankie’s body, and she sprang to her brother, her fingers shaking as she lifted him, his skin cold in contrast to the heat of the tears spilling over her cheeks.
“Johnny!”
She felt his name on her lips, and yet she heard nothing, her ears filled with her pulse, thudding hard, racing, drowning out everything else. She tried frantically to make him move, or say something, but he only lied there, limp, motionless. She looked around, trying to find someone, anyone who could help him, but there was only grass, now dead and dried to a crisp, and the sky, dark and bruised blue-black. She was helpless, she couldn’t protect him, she had failed him.
At last, her eyes returned to him, looking down, and the chimera in her arms stared back at her with glowing gold irises.

Frances Hale gasped, sitting bolt upright, her eyes flying open. She looked down into her arms, but nothing was there. Her shaking fingers rose to brush dark hair back from her forehead, damp with cold sweat, and within a few moments, reality had set in.
She was on a cot in a dark room, cold air emanating from the stone walls. The troops of Operation: Morningstar had retreated from their loss at York to a hidden base underground, where they would be safe, for now, from the Chimera. In the dark, she could just make out five or six more cots lined beside hers, some empty, others accommodating sleeping soldiers. A lightbulb flickered in the hallway just outside the room, and the faint sound of voices could be heard in the distance.

She stood, folding her blanket on her cot before entering the hallway, pulling her coat tightly around her, her pistol strapped to her belt. She wasn’t entirely sure how skilled the Chimera were when it came to tracking, but she assumed there was a good possibility that they could be found at any given moment, and she wanted to be safe.

At last, she reached the room from which she had heard conversation earlier. Several people sat around a table inside, some she knew or recognised, others she didn’t.

“We’ve lost nearly a fifth of this operation’s men already,” one man said, “We simply don’t have a chance with assault strategies, we need to fall back and try to move through quietly, if we try to kill them all before getting to what we want, we won’t have any men left by the time we get to the Angel—if we ever reach that point in the first place.”

“How the hell are we supposed to find it?” A woman interjected, “We don’t even know if it’s real or just a rumor at this point. It could be an ambush, what if we’re just walking into our own execution?”

“We’re doing that no matter what move we make, at this point.”

“We don’t have a chance of finding it, there’s no navigation procedures, nothing even close to tipping us off to the Angel’s location.”

“We’ve gotten closer,” Frankie said from where she stood in the doorway. Everyone in the room turned to look at her, awaiting an explanation. She took a deep breath, and continued. “Those of us who were infected, but didn’t… The visions, the nightmares, all of it has gotten worse as we’ve moved further inland. I’m almost positive that it has something to do with the Angel and its control over the chimera. With our partial infection, we can almost sense the communications it sends out.”
She looked around the room, and the grimaces of a few gold-eyed faces confirmed that she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed.

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