Division 13 Case File 013-009: Cole

“This is for you, Cap…”

In the aftermath of The Tomb, Division 13 uncovers a message left behind — a recorded tape addressed directly to Captain Shipman.

What follows is not just an explanation… but a revelation.

A story of survival in the mountains of Afghanistan.
A discovery buried deep in darkness.

As the truth unfolds, the team is forced to confront a chilling reality:

The events at The Tomb were not an accident.

They were part of something much larger.

And someone has been pulling the strings from the very beginning...

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 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_02 0:15

There are moments in this work where you find yourself sitting in a room listening to something that changes the shape of everything you thought you understood. Where the ground shifts quietly and permanently, and you know, even as it's happening, that you will never quite see things the same way again. This was one of those moments. We were gathered in my office, all of us. Kendrick, Overton, and Castillo, Loretta Smith standing near the back wall with her arms folded and her expression carefully neutral. I had considered watching the tape alone, decided against it. Whatever was on it, we were going to face it together. That was the only way I knew how to lead. I pressed play. Static. Then a face filled the screen. Cold. He was seated, relaxed, the way a man sits when he has all the time in the world and knows it. He looked human. Completely, entirely human. The eyes I remembered from Afghanistan. The man I remembered from two years of after action reports. He looked at the camera the way you look at someone you know well enough to skip the formalities with. He smiled.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

Hey cat. Surprised to see me? Knowing you, you're not. It's not easy to catch you off guard.

SPEAKER_02 1:47

I found myself watching the room from the corner of my eye. Kendrick to my left had gone very still. The stillness of a man who was keeping something contained. Castillo's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Overton's face was unreadable. Her eyes fixed on the screen with the cold precision of someone cataloging every detail. Loretta in the back hadn't moved. Her expression was stoic. I had known somewhere in the back of my mind, from somewhere around level three of the tomb, that Cole was responsible for taking the facility offline. The pieces had arranged themselves too neatly. The inside help, the planted duffel, the precision of every trap. It had Cole's fingerprints all over it, even before we found the surveillance footage. I hadn't said it out loud. There had been no point until we knew for certain. Now we knew. I kept my face still and let him talk.

SPEAKER_01 2:55

I'll save you the trouble of wondering. Yeah. I let myself get caught. Wasn't exactly how I'd have chosen to spend my time, but it had to be done.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

A pause. That smile again.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Easy, unhurried. I know you pulled the tablet. Good work, by the way. I couldn't touch it myself. That thing is toxic to my kind. Couldn't get within 10 feet of it without feeling like my skin was trying to leave my body. A beat. So I needed someone else to do the heavy lifting. Funny how that worked out.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

Kendrick exhaled through his nose. I caught it without looking at him.

SPEAKER_01 3:38

My primary reason for being at the tomb was simpler than you'd think. I needed to get Billy out. He leaned forward slightly, elbows on his knees. That kid is something else, Cap. I mean that. He is a killing machine. Damn near mindless when he's working, but so good at it. So purely, naturally good at it, that he scares even me. And I don't scare easily anymore.

SPEAKER_02 4:08

A pause. Something that might have been admiration moving across his face.

SPEAKER_01 4:13

He was very, very important to our plans. Has been from the beginning.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

Another pause. His expression shifted. Something wry and knowing settling into the lines around his eyes.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Funny thing, Cap. Without Billy?

SPEAKER_02 4:31

He tilted his head, the ghost of a smile. You don't even have a Division 13. The room reacted. It wasn't loud. We were all trained people, none of us given to outbursts, but I felt the collective shift in the air. Castile's breath caught. Kendrick's head turned slightly, jaw working. Overton's eyes moved to me for just a fraction of a second before returning to the screen. Even Loretta at the back shifted her weight. The implications were landing exactly the way Cole intended them to. Everything we had built, everything we had survived, every case, every mission, every loss, all of it potentially traceable back to a deliberate act of engineering by the very people we were fighting. I let the thought sit where it was and kept watching. Secondary mission.

SPEAKER_01 5:32

Cole continued, business like now. There was a second artifact at the tomb, smaller than the tablet, being held in a containment unit on level six. That easy, mocking smile. Naughty, naughty, keeping things that don't belong to you. The containment unit was the only reason I could even get near it. Without that shielding, it would have been as untouchable for me as the tablet. But with it? He spread his hands. So, thanks for that. Really. The smile widened, cold and gleeful. Now we've got one, and you've got the other. Both artifacts are part of something bigger. A lot bigger. You'll understand what I mean by that soon enough.

SPEAKER_02 6:24

He sat back, seemed to gather himself.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Anyway, I'm betting you're wondering how I made it out of Afghanistan.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

He was quiet for a moment before he began, and then After I left you, I made it to the village.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

Took maybe 10 minutes on foot. By the time I arrived, the first mortar rounds were already falling. The Soviets softened it up first. That's what they do. Put the heavy ordnance in, destroy the infrastructure, scatter everyone, create chaos. Then the ground forces move in to finish what's left. Textbook. I'd seen it in briefings. Never seen it in person. Nothing prepares you for it in person.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

His voice had changed. The performance was still there. He was always performing. I understood that now. But underneath it, something real was pressing through. Something that hadn't been fully processed or filed away, even after all the years and all the transformation. Body parts, Cap.

SPEAKER_01 7:30

Parts. Not bodies. Parts. Men, women, children, they were just distributed. Across the ground, across the walls, across each other. The smell, the sounds, the screams. A pause. I'll never get the screams out of my head. Never. If we had stayed, if we had called in air support, gotten eyes on the incursion, given those people even an hour of cover, there might have been a chance. Some of them might have made it. The voice tightened. But you decided to leave, didn't you?

SPEAKER_02 8:09

It wasn't a question. I sat with it the way I had sat with it for years. I didn't look away from the screen.

SPEAKER_01 8:17

Second wave came while I was still trying to find anyone alive to pull out. Mortars again, then the tanks moving through the streets. I was in the open when the round hit my position. I remember the pressure more than the sound. The blast picked me up and threw me, I don't know how far, and I went through a door. Wooden. Didn't slow me down much. Landed inside someone's house. What was left of it? Nothing in there but smoke and blood and the remains of what used to be a family. I tried to stand, couldn't figure out why I kept falling. Took me a while to understand what I was looking at when I finally got a clear look at myself.

SPEAKER_02 8:57

He stopped. Something moved across his face. Not grief, exactly. The echo of a memory.

SPEAKER_01 9:05

My left hand, my left foot, gone. Just gone. I was in shock. I must have been. Because what I remember most is not the pain, but the strange, disconnected curiosity of it. Like it was happening to someone else, and I was just watching. I could hear AK fire starting up outside. Short bursts. The Soviets were in the streets, going door to door. Another pause. I knew what that meant.

SPEAKER_02 9:35

In the office, nobody moved. Castillo had her arms crossed, her eyes fixed on the screen with an expression that wasn't quite pity and wasn't quite horror, but was somewhere between the two. Kendrick was totally still. Known him the way you know someone you've bled with. Not their whole life, but the shape of their character, what they were made of underneath. He had been made of loyalty and moral convictions so strong it had finally broken everything else. Listening to him describe that room, the horror of it all, it yet again reminded me of the full weight of what I had left him to carry. I kept my face still and let him continue.

SPEAKER_01 10:28

I tore rags off the clothes of the family on the floor. Didn't look at their faces. I needed to stop the bleeding so I wouldn't leave a trail. Wrapped the stumps as tight as I could manage with one hand. Then I crawled. Through the glass and the blood and whatever else was on that floor, out the back of the house, into the foothills behind the village. I could still hear it behind me: the rifle fire, the occasional scream, the sound of tanks in narrow streets. I kept going because stopping meant dying, and dying meant they won. That's the only thought I had that made any sense. Keep moving. Don't stop. Don't give them the satisfaction. I dragged myself into the hills. I don't know how long it took. Hours. The sun was getting low by the time I found the cliff face. There was a crack in the rock. Narrow, maybe two feet wide. I crawled into it looking for shelter, thinking I'd sleep a few hours, figure out what came next.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

A pause.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

The opening widened inside. It was bigger than it looked from the outside. I made it maybe 20 feet in before I passed out. When I woke up, it was dark, not dim, dark, no light at all. And I wasn't alone. I could hear things moving in the chamber, more than one. Quiet, deliberate, the way something moves when it doesn't need to be careful because it knows you can't see it. His voice dropped. Then, about six feet in front of me, a pair of eyes opened. Orange. Burning orange in the absolute dark, looking right at me. That was the last thing I saw for a while.

SPEAKER_02 12:20

He shifted in his seat, rolled his shoulders slightly, as if settling into the next part of the telling.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

When I woke up again, I was strapped to a bed. Not a hospital bed, but something close, functional, utilitarian. The room around me was built into the rock. Someone had carved a laboratory out of the inside of that mountain. Modern equipment, proper lighting, the works. Whoever these people were, they had resources. I made the mistake of looking down at myself.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

He paused. The smile that followed was thin and without warmth.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

They had me open, most of my torso. I could see things I was never supposed to see, and running into me from half a dozen different points, IV lines, pumping something orange and glowing into my bloodstream.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

He tilted his head. A quiet huff as he continued.

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Then I heard a voice, low, somewhere to my left, said, He's made it further than any of our other test subjects. If he survives the night, we'll know that we've been successful.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

And then I was out again. What followed was. I don't have a word for it. Agony is too small a word to describe it. I would wake up in it as it washed over me in waves and then go back under. Over and over, for what felt like an eternity. I lost count of how many times the cycle repeated. I stopped trying to count. The first time I woke up with anything resembling a working mind, I wasn't strapped down anymore. And there was a man sitting across the room from me.

SPEAKER_02 14:17

Cole stopped. Something in his expression shifted, genuine this time, the memory seeming to stir something within him.

SPEAKER_01 14:26

No orange eyes, just a man. But a man like nothing I'd ever seen. As he stood to reach his full height, I could see he stood about seven feet, maybe 300 pounds of pure muscle. He crossed the room and introduced himself. Malrick. Cole let the name sit for a moment. He said he was the leader of something called the Nullborn. A slight smile. Knowing what I know now, I think he chose to introduce himself in a less threatening form. Ease me into it. He's patient that way. Patient in ways that make your head hurt if you think about them too long. I'm not gonna tell you what he told me next, Cap. You wouldn't believe it. I know I didn't. Not right away. But you'll find out. You'll find out all of it. Their history, their plans. That gleeful expression again, briefly.

SPEAKER_02 15:25

You're going to love it. His face went flat. Instantly. The way a light gets switched off.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

Or maybe you won't. Maybe Mr. Holier Than Thou. Mr. I follow orders and sleep just fine. Maybe you're going to find out what it feels like to have everything stripped away from you. Everything you think makes you who you are. Everything you care about.

SPEAKER_02 15:52

The orange was bleeding into his eyes now, slow and steady.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

Maybe you're going to find out how it feels to wish you were dead and not have that option available to you.

SPEAKER_02 16:03

Nobody in the room spoke. The glow faded. Cole blinked. The smile came back. The sudden change in his mood was disturbing.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Anyway, Malric's people saved my life. Rebuilt me. What they put in my blood, the same thing that creates the nullborn. It did things to me I'm still discovering.

SPEAKER_02 16:26

He held up his left hand, flexed the fingers slowly.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

My hand. My foot. They grew back. Took weeks. Hurt the entire time. But they grew back. My senses sharpened. I can see in near total darkness. Not perfectly, but enough. My strength and speed are. He seemed to search for the right word. Increased. Significantly beyond what they were. I'm not as fast or strong as Billy. That kid is a genuine freak of nature, and I mean that with complete respect. But I am considerably faster and stronger than any human you're likely to encounter. And then, there's the other thing.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

He paused, as if deciding whether to tell it.

SPEAKER_01 17:18

Maurick calls it a unique blessing. No other nullborn has it, apparently. In sufficient darkness, I can become essentially invisible, not metaphorically, physically. You can be looking directly at the space I'm standing and see nothing.

SPEAKER_02 17:35

The memory hit me without warning. My house in Queens. The feeling of not being alone. That instinct that had gone off like an alarm before I'd seen anything, before I'd heard anything. Footsteps rushing at me down the stairs with nothing attached to them. The voice from the dark. You can sense me. Incredible. I should be invisible to you.

SPEAKER_01 18:04

I forced that memory down and kept listening. Maurick and I talk through the weeks of my recovery. About the Nullborne's philosophy, about what they believe, what they're building toward, what they need. A pause. He thinks in centuries, plans in eons. Everything he does is a move in a game that's been in progress longer than any of us has been alive. Cole seemed almost admiring. He opened my eyes, made me understand that what I'd been calling morality was just conditioned weakness. The world belongs to those who are willing to take it. He made me a believer. He also pointed out that my desire for revenge and his plans happened to align very neatly. That the same city that was necessary for his purposes was also where I'd find the one I wanted to make answer for what happened in Afghanistan. That smile again, small and certain. That's what brought us to New York. To your city cap. To your doorstep.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

He leaned forward one final time. The orange had returned to his eyes. Present now, steady, not a flash, but a permanent glow. The mask of easy confidence was still there, but underneath it, something older and colder had surfaced. I almost expected him to undergo the horrifying transformation I had witnessed weeks ago. The obsidian skin, the brightly glowing orange eyes, but he remained calm enough to keep his normal human appearance. At least for now.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

You'll see it all soon enough. We're going to revive the Lightbringer. We're going to change this world in ways you can't imagine from where you're sitting. A pause. And you, you are going to pay for what you did. I'm going to make sure you understand, fully and completely, what it costs to lose everything. His voice dropped. And there isn't a single thing you can do to stop it.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

He reached forward toward the camera, stopped, looked directly into the lens one final time.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Be seeing you, Cap.

SPEAKER_02 20:39

Static. Then nothing. Quiet. The city moved outside the glass walls of my office, agents at their desks, phones ringing somewhere in the bullpen, the distant sound of the street below, all of it continuing, indifferent, unaware. I sat in silence for a moment. We all did. Kendrick spoke first. He stood up, slowly. Inside help, he said. His voice was controlled, but I could hear what was underneath it. The fury of a man who protects people for a living, being told that the protection had a hole in it. We already suspected as much, but hearing him confirm it, he shook his head. Someone in this program helped Cole get that charge under his skin, helped plant that duffel. There is a traitor somewhere in Sentinel Prime, and until we find them, everything we do is compromised. Nobody argued with that.

SPEAKER_05 21:46

The light bringer, Overton said.

SPEAKER_02 21:49

Her notebook was open, pen moving, clinical, focused, finding the analytical thread even in the middle of the emotional weight of it.

SPEAKER_05 22:00

This isn't the first time we've heard that. Evelyn Carter mentioned it as well. Whatever it is, it's central to the Nullborne's plans. It's what they're building toward.

SPEAKER_02 22:12

She looked up.

SPEAKER_05 22:14

Everything else, the neon, the tomb, both artifacts, it all points in that direction. The lightbringer is the goal. And we handed them a piece of it.

SPEAKER_02 22:27

Castillo said. Quiet, direct. She had been still throughout the tape.

SPEAKER_03 22:34

The tablet. We recovered it, brought it back, and now they know exactly where it is. If Cole is right that both artifacts are part of something larger, then we're holding half of what they need.

SPEAKER_02 22:45

And they must have a plan for that. Kendrick finished. The thought settled over the room like weather. There's something else, I said. They looked at me. Cole said that without Billy, there might not have been a Division XII. I let that breathe for a moment. Think about what that means. The Wrath case in 79, the incident that led to the formation of this unit, was not random. Billy was deliberately unleashed, which means Division 13 was not a response to the noborn threat. I paused. It was engineered by it. The silence that followed was a different kind of silence from the one after the tape ended. That had been the silence of shock. This was the silence of people recalibrating, running back through many months of cases, decisions, sacrifices, and asking themselves what was real and what was stage managed. Kendrick sat back down. So everything, he said. Every case, every move we've made, they've been watching it, shaping it. Who are these people? He looked at me, and for the first time in the years I had known him, I saw something in his eyes that was not quite anger and not quite despair, but was close to both. Something he quickly and professionally suppressed as he continued. Captain, we've been reacting since day one. We have never once been ahead of them. He leaned forward. That has to change. We have to go on the offensive. Stop waiting for the next move and start making our own. Overton looked up from her notebook.

SPEAKER_05 24:37

Agreed. But we can't go on the offensive without better intelligence. We don't know enough about the nullborn, the lightbringer, the artifacts, or the full scope of their operation to act effectively. We need information before we can act on it.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

Castile's eyes moved to Loretta Smith. So did mine. Loretta had been still throughout, still in the way of someone who has learned through long practice to reveal nothing. But the resignation in her expression was there, underneath the composure. The look of someone who has been waiting for a conversation they knew was coming. I stood up. We've got Jack's service to get to, I said. All of us. He deserves that, and we're going to give it to him. I looked at the team. These people who had walked into an Alaskan black site with me, who had fought through six levels of horror, who had made it out carrying something they were never going to put down. After that, I turned to Loretta. We need to have a talk, I said. A real one. Everything on the table. Everything you know, everything Sentinel Prime knows, everything that hasn't made it into our briefings. I held her eyes. All of it. Loretta Smith looked at me for a long moment. Something moved across her face. Not guilt, exactly, but the weight of information carried too long and too alone. Yes, she said quietly.

SPEAKER_04 26:20

We do.

SPEAKER_02 26:22

The team began to move. Quietly, with purpose, the way people move when grief and duty are pulling in the same direction, and there is nothing to do but follow both. I was last to leave, as usual. I stood in my office for a moment after the others had gone, looking at the cassette sitting in its evidence bag on my desk. Cole's voice was still in the room, somehow. The way certain things linger, not as sound, but as presence, as weight. I thought about a young sergeant ripping his insignia from his uniform in a village at the edge of the world, telling me it was the right thing to do, walking toward the sound of the guns. I thought about what that man had crawled through to survive, what had been done to him in a cave in the mountains of Afghanistan, what he had become in the years between then and now. I thought about Billy Rath, ten years old, painting words in blood on a warehouse wall in Brooklyn. The nullborn are here. The first domino in a sequence that had led to this office, this team, this moment. We had been built to fight them. That had always felt like purpose. I was beginning to understand it might have been something else entirely. I picked up the evidence bag, labeled it, set it with the rest. Then I went to bury one of my people. End case file zero one three zero zero nine.