Division 13 Case File 013-019: Shadowvale Station

Division 9 has gone dark.

Three weeks ago, an entire Sentinel PRIME team stationed in the Nevada desert disappeared without a trace. Their headquarters was locked down from the inside. No distress call. No survivors. No explanation.

And somewhere inside the abandoned facility is an artifact that Division 13 has been ordered to recover.

Captain David Shipman and his team travel to Shadowvale Station, a forgotten railroad town surrounded by miles of empty desert. What they find inside Division 9's headquarters isn't a battlefield.

It's something more disturbing.

Blood.
 Missing personnel.
 Wiped surveillance.
 Evidence that someone stayed behind long enough to clean up.

And an artifact sitting untouched inside a sealed vault.

Someone knew Division 13 would eventually come looking for it.

Someone has been waiting.

As Shipman confronts a threat he never knew existed, one terrifying possibility begins to emerge:

What if the Nullborn aren't the only enemy hiding in plain sight?

🎧 Division 13: The NYPD's Secret Paranormal Files is a cinematic supernatural thriller blending police procedural, horror, science fiction, and conspiracy into one interconnected universe.

Transcript

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Division 13 And A Bad Dream

SPEAKER_05 0:00

My name is Hannah Keegan. I'm a lead detective for a top secret New York Police Department Task Force. We're assigned to the unexplained cases that border on the paranormal. This is Division 13, and here are our case files.

SPEAKER_04 0:16

I'm at my desk. That's where it starts. Normal enough. The operations room is visible through the glass walls of my office. People moving at their stations. The familiar low hum of a building that's always doing something. My coffee is there. My files are there. The city is outside the window doing what it always does. And Castile's in the doorway. Which is normal. She stands in my doorway a dozen times a week. Usually she's got a question, a report, something she wants to run by me before she puts it in writing. There's a deja vu quality to seeing her there that I notice. The sense that this has happened before, that I'm inside something familiar. I almost relax into it.

SPEAKER_07 1:07

How do you do it, Cap?

SPEAKER_04 1:09

She says.

SPEAKER_07 1:17

Every single day.

SPEAKER_04 1:19

Her voice is even, professional, like she's actually curious. I start to formulate an answer. It's a fair question, I've thought about it before. But something's changing in her expression before I can speak. It's going wrong around the eyes.

SPEAKER_07 1:37

What gives you the right?

SPEAKER_04 1:39

She says, and the professionalism is gone, and there's something hard and cold underneath it that I've never heard from Castillo before.

SPEAKER_07 1:48

What gives you the right to decide that?

SPEAKER_04 1:51

Before I can recover from my surprise and formulate a response, I notice movement to my left. I turn in that direction. Kendrick and Overton are standing there. Both of them. Both with expressions I've never seen directed at me. Not by these two, not in all the time we've worked together. Kendrick's jaw is set with a kind of anger that looks like betrayal. Overton's face is the coldest I've ever seen it. Answer the question, Cap, Kendrick says. His voice is flat and hard. Answer it.

SPEAKER_06 2:28

You're not God, Overton says. No one should have that authority. No one.

SPEAKER_04 2:39

Nothing comes out. I turn to my right. Angela and Lizzie are standing there. Their skin is the gray-yellow pallor of something no longer living. Their eyes are completely black. Not orange, not glowing, just black, absorbing all available light, giving nothing back. And down their faces, slow and dark, black tears are running. Both of them. Mother and daughter. Staring at me with expressions that are worse than anger. Something running way deeper than just anger.

SPEAKER_06 3:18

You were supposed to keep us safe, Angela says. Lizzie says, We trusted you. We thought you were our superhero.

SPEAKER_04 3:28

The word hits me the way it did the first time she said it. In the brownstone in Flatbush. Except the first time it was a gift. And this time it's an indictment. I take a step back. My heel finds something. I turn. Cole. He's close. Closer than he should be able to be in a room this size. He's wearing his human face. The face I remember from Afghanistan, from the unit, from years of after-action reports and shared foxholes. But as I watch, it's slowly beginning to change. The flesh is going gray-yellow underneath. His eyes are starting to blaze. That orange light, sourceless and cold, coming up from somewhere behind them.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

You've always called yourself the good guy, he says.

SPEAKER_04 4:22

His voice is level, even as his features continue to morph.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

You've always believed that, haven't you?

SPEAKER_04 4:30

It's not a question.

SPEAKER_00 4:32

You're not the good guy, Cap. You're no better than us. And we're going to prove it.

SPEAKER_04 4:38

His jaw begins to unhinge. That impossible, horrible widening that I've seen before, that no human mouth is built to do. The orange in his eyes goes full and bright. You're going to face a gauntlet like no one has ever faced before you. I turn away. There's a mirror in front of me. There shouldn't be a mirror here. There's no mirror in my office. But there is one now. And I'm looking into it. And what I see in it isn't me. It's darkness. Just darkness. Flat and total, where my reflection should be. And out of that darkness, two points of orange light stare back. Not my face. Not my expression. Just the eyes. Waiting. Watching. I wake up. The ceiling of Angela's bedroom. Beyond the windows, nighttime in the city. Never entirely dark, the city always leaking light the way it does. A distant siren, someone's car two blocks over. The smell of her apartment. The weight of the blanket. Angela is lying beside me, already awake, watching me with a concerned expression.

SPEAKER_06 6:02

You are tossing and turning, she says.

SPEAKER_04 6:25

She doesn't argue. She knows me well enough by now to know when I'm done with a conversation before it started. She settles back against the pillow, and her hand finds mine under the blanket. And that's all she says. I lie there in the dark for a while. The orange eyes in the mirror look back at me from somewhere behind my closed eyelids, patient as anything. And I tell myself, it was just a dream. I'm not entirely sure I believe it.

Division IX Vanishes With An Artifact

SPEAKER_04 7:18

She said.

SPEAKER_06 7:34

Three weeks ago, Division IX went dark. All personnel unaccounted for, facility unresponsive. Sentinel Prime attempted remote access. Systems were locked down from the inside.

SPEAKER_04 7:46

She looked up.

SPEAKER_06 7:47

We don't know what happened. We don't know if anyone survived. What we do know is that Division IX was holding an artifact in a high security vault on site. Recovering that artifact is the primary objective.

SPEAKER_04 7:59

I took the briefing file and turned to the team. Kendrick had questions about the lockdown. Who triggered it? Why? Whether it was defensive or offensive. Overton wanted the last known communications log. Castillo wanted to know what kind of environment we were walking into. Desert, open terrain, long sight lines. Kenny asked about the vault specks. I answered where I could and deferred where I couldn't. And somewhere in the middle of it I became aware that Kendrick was watching me, in a way that did nothing to hide his curiosity and concern. You alright, Cap? He asked during a pause. I looked at him, part of me realizing that he'd just asked a question he already had half an answer to. Yeah, I said. I think so. No worries. He held my eyes for a beat. Then he nodded and moved on, and I could tell that he'd filed it rather than dismissed it, which is what Kendrick does with things he's not done with yet.

Crossing The Nevada High Desert

SPEAKER_04 9:06

We departed HQ two hours later. The Gulf Stream put us down at a small regional airfield 40 miles west of the target. We drove the rest of the way in two rented SUVs, and the landscape outside the windows was the kind that makes you understand why people describe certain places as the middle of nowhere. The place had a definite end-of-the-world feel. Not because it was hostile, because it was barren and indifferent. The Nevada High Desert had the quality of a place that had never particularly cared about human beings and had no strong feelings about our continued presence. The scrub was pale and sparse. The sky was enormous and the color of old bone. The road was straight and went on forever, and on either side of it, nothing moved. Shadowvale Station appeared on the horizon as a cluster of low shapes, buildings, a water tower, the rusty skeletal framework of rail infrastructure that hadn't seen active use in decades. As we got closer, the details filled in. Sunbleached clabbered, empty windows, a main street that had once been something and wasn't anymore. The rail yard at the far end of town, overgrown at the edges, the track still there but buried under grit and blown debris. Nothing moved. No birds, no wind. The silence had a weight to it that I noticed before I'd consciously identified what I was noticing.

SPEAKER_02 10:47

Feels wrong, Castillo said from the back seat. Everything feels wrong out here, Kenny said, looking out the window. The geography is wrong, the scale is wrong, too much sky, not enough everything else.

SPEAKER_07 11:02

That's not what I mean.

SPEAKER_02 11:03

I knew what she meant.

SPEAKER_04 11:05

We found the Division IX facility on the eastern edge of town, a building that had probably once been a Freight Depot, retrofitted with the kind of low-profile modifications that Sentinel Prime used when it wanted something to look like one thing and be another. Reinforced walls behind ordinary exteriors, blast-resistant windows behind ordinary glass, a door that looked like a standard commercial entry, and absolutely was not. The access codes didn't work. It rejected us with a flashing LED message, informing us that the facility was currently in lockdown status. Kenny had the panel open in four minutes. He worked with the focused efficiency he brought to everything. Not rushing, not showing off, just getting the job done. The door clicked and swung inward. The smell reached

Lockdown Breach And A Stripped Facility

SPEAKER_04 12:00

us before the darkness did. Not death, or not only death, something more unidentifiable than that. The smell of a place that had been sealed for a while, and of whatever had happened inside it before it was sealed. Lights on, I said. Weapons ready, we clear room by room. We went in. The interior layout was familiar in the way that facilities built to the same operational template are always familiar. The same basic bones as our New York headquarters, the same thinking about traffic flow and sight lines and separation of operational from support functions. If I'd been dropped into it blind, I'd have known immediately what kind of place it was. Except this version had been through something. The damage wasn't random, that was the first thing I noticed. Random damage has a specific quality: the chaos of a struggle, things knocked over and broken where people happened to be when the fighting happened. This damage had a pattern. Workstations cleared, filing cabinets opened and emptied, certain rooms intact, others stripped to the walls. Someone had moved through this facility with a purpose, taking specific things and leaving specific things, and had done it in enough time that they could be deliberate about it. The blood spatter was intermittent, door frames, one wall and what had been the bullpen, a long smear across the floor of the corridor leading to the rear of the building that ended at a drainage grate. The drain had been cleaned. Recently enough that I could still smell the chemical. No bodies. Someone had removed the bodies.

SPEAKER_06 13:48

18 people stationed here, Overton said.

SPEAKER_04 13:51

She was moving through the bullpen, her eyes cataloging everything.

SPEAKER_06 13:56

Nine support staff, nine field personnel. All gone.

SPEAKER_07 14:01

Gone how? Where?

SPEAKER_04 14:03

Castillo said. Nobody had an answer. We found the vault at the rear of the facility, behind a security door that the lockdown had sealed from the inside. Kenny bypassed it the same way he'd bypassed the entry, methodically, without drama. The door opened. Inside, in a sealed case sitting on the vault's single shelf, was the artifact. The same, not quite metal. The same impossible preservation. It sat there in its case like it had been waiting for us specifically, which I didn't find comforting. Kendrick, I said, secure the case. He closed and locked the case lid and picked it up. We moved to the security office. The surveillance system had power. The lockdown had kept the building's emergency cells charged. Overton pulled up the archive. We all saw it at the same time. The footage ended. Not gradually, not corrupted. It ended. A clean cut at a timestamp three weeks ago. And after that timestamp, nothing. Someone had wiped the system before they left. The perimeter alarm went off. We came out armed and in formation, moving to positions that gave us cover and sight lines on the facility's approach routes. Three SUVs moving at a controlled pace from the western end of Shadowvale Station's main street. Not rushing, not trying to hide, coming toward us with a measured pace that denied any need to hurry. They stopped 50 yards out. The doors opened. Eight people came out, tactical gear, weapons, professional movement. Maybe more people still inside the vehicles. And then one man stepped forward from the group, ahead of the others, and walked until he was 30 yards from us and stopped.

Captain Vance Demands The Case

SPEAKER_04 16:12

I knew him. The face was older than I remembered from the interdivision briefing photos. Desert weather and something else, something internal, had put new lines in it. But the posture was the same. The deliberate, authoritative stillness of a man who commanded people for a living and had internalized the vocabulary of it. Captain Leo Vance, commanding officer of Division IX. Captain Shipman, he said. His voice carried easily in the desert silence. I was hoping it'd be you they sent. Vance, I said, what the hell is going on here? I need the artifact, he said. Hand it over and your team walks away. That's a genuine offer. That's not happening, I said. I look at the faces behind him, unrecognizable. My experience telling me I wasn't dealing with a highly trained federal task force, more of a militia by the looks of them. Where's your team? Where are the Division IX personnel? He was quiet for a moment. The wind moved through the gap between two buildings behind him, lifting a small funnel of dust and setting it down again. I killed them, he said. I heard Castillo to my left draw a breath. I killed my team, Vance said again.

SPEAKER_03 17:40

I want you to understand that I'm not hiding it. I'm telling you directly because I think you deserve to know who you're dealing with.

SPEAKER_04 17:48

He didn't look like a man confessing to murder. He looked like a man explaining a decision he'd made and stood behind.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

I've been working against Sentinel Prime for years. Everything I've done as Division IX's commander has been oriented toward a single purpose, protecting and advancing the development of the Noborn. You're infected, I said. I'm not, he said. That's important for you to understand. I made this choice with a clear mind and a fully human biology. I chose it. Have you ever considered, Captain, that Sentinel Prime's fundamental premise might be wrong? That what they're calling a threat might be an emergence. That the noborn aren't an enemy to be contained, they're what comes next. They kill people, I said. The species that came before us didn't yield willingly. We didn't ask their permission. He took one step forward. I'm part of a new brotherhood now, a new mission. We call ourselves the Parasapian Fellowship. We believe the nullborn represent the next stage of what humanity can become. We've been working to protect that process from interference, from sentinel prime, from the divisions, from every institution that has decided, without evidence, that evolution should be stopped because it's inconvenient. The desert was very quiet.

SPEAKER_04 19:25

Somewhere far off, a piece of loose metal on one of the derelict buildings ticked in the wind. Your team, I said. All of them. Your people.

SPEAKER_03 19:36

You knew them. I did, he said. That was the hardest thing I've ever done. I want to be honest about that too. He met my eyes with something that might have been genuine emotion. But they would have stopped what needs to happen. And what needs to happen is more important than those people. Or the five of you. He paused, considering. He inclined his head toward the case and held out his hand. The artifact, Captain. Last offer.

SPEAKER_04 20:19

I looked at him, at the team behind him, at my team at my peripheral vision, Kendrick with the case, Castillo tight and ready, Overton and Kenny on the flanks. Kendrick, I said, without taking my eyes off Vance.

Stun Grenades And A Fast Exit

SPEAKER_04 20:36

Kendrick's arm came forward faster than the eye could follow. The stun grenade went low and fast, skipping across the ground, and then the world went white and loud, and we were already moving. What followed lasted under 90 seconds and covered about 200 yards. Castillo went right immediately, drawing fire and moving in a lateral, unpredictable pattern. She was very good at this. By this point, we all were, as Vance's team was about to find out. They opened fire, so did we. Two of them broke from their position to follow Castillo and found that pinning her down was a task that required more skill than they had available. Kendrick followed, the artifact case held tight to his body, moving with the controlled aggression of a man who has decided that the thing in his arms is getting to the vehicle, and everything between him and the vehicle is a problem to be solved. One of Vance's people tried to cut him off. Kendrick solved that problem efficiently. One shot, one kill. Kenny covered our rear, the Rygen on Mode 3, arc rounds lighting up the vehicles behind Vance's team with the blue white discharge that scattered their formation and bought us the seconds we needed. He moved backward with the focused calm of someone who had made peace with the fact that. This was his job now. Overton called Angles on the move in a running firefight. The part of her brain that was always processing geometry and probability gave the team the information that kept us from running into things. I stayed on Vance, tracking him. He hadn't moved in the initial chaos, which told me either he was genuinely confident his people would handle it, or he was waiting to see what we did before he committed. I had no intention of waiting around to find out. Vance had underestimated us, but I'm sure he'd recover shortly. I didn't intend to give him time. Kendrick, two more stunners. Overton, Castillo, take out the tires. Let's move, I ordered. We made the SUVs. Kendrick got the artifact case into the first vehicle. Castillo came in from the right seconds after. Kenny was last, still facing backward, still firing controlled bursts to keep the pursuing PSF personnel from closing the distance. Reaching the second vehicle, I tossed two more stun grenades to buy time. As Overton jumped into the passenger seat, still firing, I slammed the vehicle into drive. Vance and his people didn't follow. They were too busy yelling and cursing at multiple flat tires. I allowed myself a small smirk of satisfaction as we left Shadowvale Station behind us in a cloud of desert dust.

The Parasapian Fellowship Behind It

SPEAKER_04 23:36

The Gulf Stream leveled off at cruising altitude somewhere over Utah, and for a while nobody said much. That's how it goes after a certain kind of engagement. This was the silence of a team that had gotten out of something and needed a few minutes to let the adrenaline complete its familiar cycle before they had the bandwidth for analysis. I'd already called in a cleanup team to secure the Division IX HQ, but I'm sure Vance and his people would be long gone. Kenny had the artifact case secured in the overhead compartment. I'd watched him check the latches three times, which told me he was doing the same thing the rest of us were doing. Finding something concrete and physical to attend to while the larger processing happened underneath. Overton broke the silence first. She had her notebook out. She said.

SPEAKER_06 24:34

Years of operation right under our noses. Vance as a founding member, which means he was running Division IX as a cover while actively working against everything the division was supposed to be doing.

SPEAKER_04 24:46

She didn't look up from the page.

SPEAKER_06 24:48

The mole we've been looking for inside Sentinel Prime. The stop order on the Apex investigation. The help Cole received at the tomb.

SPEAKER_04 24:58

She paused.

SPEAKER_06 25:00

How much of that is PSF?

SPEAKER_04 25:02

We don't know yet, I said.

SPEAKER_06 25:05

But we have to consider that Sentinel Prime isn't just compromised at the individual level, she said. PSF has been operating for years, with a division commander as a founding member. That implies funding, intelligence access, operational cover. It's possible we're not just dealing with one person switching sides. It could be an entire network.

SPEAKER_04 25:29

The implication sat in the cabin with us. He wasn't wrong about everything, Kendrick said. We all looked at him.

SPEAKER_01 25:39

I'm not saying he was right, he said, his hands up in a gesture of mock surrender. He killed his own people, and he'd have killed us without losing sleep. I'm saying his argument wasn't stupid. That's different from it being correct. He lowered his hands, looked down at them in his lap. If you didn't know what the noborn actually were, if all you saw was the transformation, the enhancement, the survival, and you decided that was evolution rather than infection, the logic holds. You'd arrive at PSF.

SPEAKER_07 26:16

That's what makes them dangerous, Castillo said. They're not delusional, they've thought it through.

SPEAKER_06 26:23

Which means they can recruit, Overton said. And evidently have been for years.

SPEAKER_02 26:31

Regardless, they're criminals, and seemingly rational or not, the whole thing gave me religious fanatic vibes, Kenny said.

SPEAKER_04 26:40

I looked out the window at the cloud layer below us. Somewhere beneath it, Utah was giving way to Colorado, the Rockies invisible under the overcast, the country going by underneath us, ordinary and continuous. We go back to HQ, I said. We brief Loretta, we hand over the artifact, and then we figure out how deep this goes. I paused. Because if PSF has people inside Sentinel Prime, and we have to assume they do, then every operation we run, every piece of intelligence we receive, every move we make is potentially visible to the enemy.

SPEAKER_07 27:25

So what do we do about that?

SPEAKER_04 27:27

We'll move on them, I said. For now, our mission was to secure the artifact. But we'll find out more about their organization, structure, and capabilities, and then we'll move. The board is already too damn crowded to let another faction like this operate. Kenny's right, they're criminals, and they're going down. The cabin went quiet again. Outside, the clouds moved under the aircraft in slow, indifferent waves.

The Reflection Follows Us Home

SPEAKER_04 27:59

A while later, Kendrick appeared in the seat next to mine. He sat. He didn't say anything for a moment. Then, You sure you're alright, Cap? I looked at him. He had the same expression he'd had in the briefing room. Patient, not pressing, just present. I'm fine, I said, nodding. Same answer as Angela, delivered in the same tone. He heard it. I could tell from the slight adjustment in his expression, the way he absorbed it and said it somewhere without responding to it directly. He nodded. He didn't push. He got up and went back to his seat, next to Castillo. I looked at the window. The cloud cover had thinned, and in the glass, faintly, I could see my own reflection. The ghost of it, transparent against the sky outside. I looked at it for a moment. Then I looked away. We flew east. The city was waiting. I told myself I was fine. I wasn't entirely sure I believed it. End case file zero one three dash zero one nine.