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As he approached the alley, Jason heard a deep, resonant hum like that of a generator. Lights flickered from the narrow alley between the buildings, flashes of blue-white like those from an arc welder cutting through the darkness.

He glanced back at Mitchell and Helena. They were waiting to cross at the lights.

Jason slowed to a walk, wondering what could be causing the flashes between the buildings. Wisps of smoke drifted from the alley. He stepped around the corner and into a gale not dissimilar to what he'd once felt from the downdraft of a landing helicopter. Flecks of dust and dirt whipped through the air. Scraps of paper tore around him.

Lily was no more than thirty feet away in the middle of the alley, bathed in a blinding green light. She was leaning slightly backwards, pitched at an unnatural angle, one that should have caused her to fall to the ground, but somehow she remained upright. Her arms were outstretched, as though she had been crucified on some invisible cross, while her feet drifted a few feet above the ground. White smoke billowed down from above. Bursts of vapor surged out of a series of flickering lights some twenty stories above the alley. The smoke swirled around her body as she slowly gained height.

“No.”

Jason's one word was barely audible above the pulsating hum coming down from above.

The white light transformed into a kaleidoscope of color. Tiny, circular rainbows formed in the cold white mist, giving the view a trance-like quality.

Jason fell to his knees just a few feet inside the alley.

“No,” he repeated. “This can't be happening.”

Lily was being drawn up toward the light, with her arms outstretched and her hands limp. Her body was pulled up into the swirling clouds still churning down from above.

The circle of lights above the building began turning, slowly building in speed as Lily's body rose higher, becoming lost in the mist. From what Jason could tell, the lights were roughly forty to fifty feet across, but their exact width was obscured by the rooftop. Whatever this was, it had to be hovering no more than a few feet above the roof. Jason wanted to run for the stairs, to chase after Lily, but his body felt weak, drained of strength.

The rainbow of colors radiating above him reached a fever pitch, moving so fast the individual lights became indistinguishable.

And then it was gone.

The mist cleared, dissipating and disappearing into the night, leaving a clear view of the clouds thousands of feet above.

There were footsteps behind him.

“Tell me you saw that?” Jason said, his eyes still looking skyward.

“Saw what?” Mitchell asked, coming up beside him.

In the distance, well beyond the rooftop, bursts of light broke through the night. Spectacular splashes of color lit up the grey, moody clouds as fireworks burst in the sky over the river.

“Oh, damn. We missed the show,” Mitchell said with a hint of disappointment in his voice.

“We need to get you to a doctor,” Helena said, ignoring Mitchell as she reached out her hand and helped Jason to his feet.

Jason was shaking. His fingers were trembling.

“You're in shock,” she said, looking into his eyes with compassion. She raised his forearms, taking a good look at the grazes on his arms. “Oh, that's got to hurt. Come on. Let's get you to the emergency room and get you cleaned up. I hope your tetanus shots are up to date.”

Jason was in shock, but it wasn't the pain in his arms that had shaken his being. He'd spent the best part of a decade building a rational model of the universe in his thinking, establishing a framework for understanding the cosmos and formulating his theories and calculations, but here, in a matter of seconds, his world had unravelled. What seemed so crazy when Mitchell talked about it now seemed probable. No, he thought, not probable, actual.

Could it be that the anecdotes of UFO sightings were true?

Was Earth being surreptitiously visited by aliens from some other world?

Could his eyes be believed?

Should he discard his scientific training over some fleeting experience that seemed more like a dream than reality?

Could these two views be reconciled?

They couldn’t, he decided, and yet he had no plausible alternative explanation for what he’d witnessed. Although he knew eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable in a court of law, he couldn’t bring himself to ignore what he’d seen.

Lily had been taken.

“There has to be another explanation,” he mumbled to himself. “There has to be.”

Lee woke bumping around in darkness.

He was in the back of a truck weaving along a rough track. He bounced on the cold metal bed of the truck, sliding as the clumsy diesel engine rattled in his ears. His hands were tied behind him. A shroud covered his head. Dim light seeped in from around his neck. He felt sick. The smell of fumes wafted around him, making it difficult to breathe.

As the truck rounded a corner, Lee fought with his hands to steady himself. His bound fingers grabbed at the corrugation built into the steel deck beneath him, and he tried to avoid bumping into what felt like wooden logs or boulders on either side of him. Lee shifted his knees, trying to get some grip when a boot kicked him in the stomach.

“Lie still!”

Lee grimaced. He hadn’t anticipated the blow. He had no way of knowing he was being watched and the boot caught him on the side of the hip, causing a jolt of pain to surge through his body. He groaned in agony, sliding into the closed tailgate as the truck rounded another corner.

It was at that moment he understood the gravity of his situation.

Lee had been part of evade-and-escape drills during his compulsory service in the South Korean air force and understood what was happening. This was the first stage of his imprisonment. No one ever escaped, either from the training exercises or the real thing. Evade and escape was a misnomer. Evade meant prolong and delay, hopefully buying others time. Escape was a false hope, something to help you through the initial interrogation. His heart sank at the realization he’d probably spend the rest of his life in a North Korean labour camp, but he knew even that estimation was overly generous. In reality, his life was probably now measured in terms of days or hours, not years.

Several boots pinned him to the metal bed of the truck, preventing him from swaying with the suspension. What he’d thought were logs were actually the boots of at least a dozen soldiers sitting on either side of him, facing in toward him. They joked among themselves, knowing he was listening.

“We will be rewarded for catching this American dog.”

“Ha, not dog. He is a pig.”

“Swine!”

“He is a spy. He will be shot.”

“Not before Eun-Yong has had this son of a bitch castrated.”

“Ha!” another soldier replied, but it wasn't so much a laugh as a forced response to meet peer expectations.

The soldiers were cruel, kicking him without warning as he lay there trying not to move, but that was the role of soldiers from all nations, he understood. They had to dehumanize their enemy. It was the only way to justify their acts. Just yesterday, he was an officer, a title that carried a sense of pride and prestige and now he was a prisoner. One brutally subjugated by an enemy. He already felt his sense of self-esteem slipping away, driven from him by the petty violence being arbitrarily inflicted on him as he lay there blinded by a sack pulled over his head.

“Stupid fool,” another voice said, and a boot crushed his little finger against the steel bed of the truck. Lee cried out in pain.

“Be quiet, idiot!” another voice cried out, kicking him the small of his back with a steel-toed boot.

The truck slowed. Lee could hear muffled voices speaking from the cab. The driver was talking to a sentry. He could hear other vehicles idling nearby. A helicopter flew low overhead. The smell of diesel hung in the air. He was at a checkpoint, possibly at the entrance to a military compound.

Lee tried not to panic, but he couldn’t help himself. The sack over his head made it hard to breathe. His arms were pinned behind him in a stress position. His leg hurt. Without being aware of it, he began to hyperventilate.

The butt of a rifle hit him on the head, knocking his forehead against the metal and he screamed in agony.

“Shut up, you suckling pig!”

Again the butt of the rifle struck him, only the wooden stock glanced off his shoulder and onto the floor of the truck, sparing him from the full force of the blow.

Lee whimpered. Blood pooled in his mouth.

The truck continued on, turning to one side. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels, a stark contrast to the squelch of mud and rock he’d heard before. He’d entered a military base, he was sure of it.

The truck came to a halt. Seconds later, he heard a steel tailgate being lowered and felt himself being lifted out of the truck. Several soldiers had him by his upper arms. They dragged him over and dropped him like a sack of coal. He expected to fall to the ground, but landed on the back of the truck. He could feel the edge of the truck fall away beneath one leg. A couple of soldiers on the ground grabbed him, pulling him over the edge. They held him by his shoulders, allowing his feet to swing down on to the gravel.

“Come, you lazy heifer.”

The references to farm animals surprised him. He’d expected more vulgarity, but North Korea was an enclave, an isolated country not subject to the Hollywood tropes of verbal abuse. For them, these references must have been insulting comparisons.

His captors pushed him on in front of them as his head hung low.

Lee tried to walk, but could only shuffle. He was still reeling from the blow to his head, and the bullet wound to his right thigh ached. Without being able to look at the wound, he figured the bullet had only grazed the muscle. When he'd fallen in the village, it must have been largely from shock. There was some kind of bandage wrapped around his leg, stopping the bleeding, but had the injury been bad, he wouldn't have been able to walk at all. Small mercies, he thought to himself as he continued on.

The world seemed to spin around him in the darkness. He could see glimpses of mud and rocks out of the bottom of the bag over his head.

Someone grabbed the sack from behind, grabbing a handful of hair along with it and jerked his head back, forcing him on at a faster pace. His feet struggled to respond. That was the point when Lee realized they’d taken his boots. He was still wearing his damp socks, but his boots had been removed, perhaps as a trophy, or perhaps just out of practical necessity by another soldier wanting better boots.

He was pushed into a hut. His feet caught on the step in the doorway, and he struggled not to fall to the floor as he was dragged inside.

A chair scraped across a wooden floor.

Someone untied his hands before pushing him down in the chair and strapping his forearms to the arms of the chair.

Lee tried to be objective and observe the fine nuances around him. This was an endurance trick the South Korean military had taught him during his evade and escape training. As a prisoner, he was powerless over all aspects of his confinement save one, his mind. He had to keep his mind sharp, to look to learn from the subtle nuances of his captivity. Details were important. Details spoke louder than words, and what's more, they were a distraction, a way of removing himself from the emotionally crippling reality that surrounded him. His captors would want to break him, and the truth was, they would, given time. His only hope was to hold out as long as possible and slowly capitulate, to appear more broken than he was. This was a game of deception on both parts, only the North Koreans were working with a stacked deck.

Details. He'd keep his sanity only by focusing on details, and so he drove his mind to be clear and objective.

Previously, Lee's hands had been bound with rope no thicker than his little finger. The rope had been too thick to break, but it wasn’t the sort of hand spun rope he’d expect to find in a fishing village, it had to be something the soldiers had carried with them. Now, though, thick leather straps bound his forearms and lower legs to the chair. His hands were free, which seemed strange. Although he was relieved to get some feeling back into his wrists, he was alarmed by the change. He understood that everything he was enduring had a purpose, nothing was accidental or haphazard. More often than not, that purpose would be brutal and cruel. Lee doubted this wooden chair held any relief.

The sack was pulled from his head.

There was no one in front of him or to either side. Whoever it was that pulled the sack from his head remained out of sight behind him. Light peered under the door to his right. From the angle, it couldn't have been more than seven in the morning. Given the angle of the sunlight, he was facing roughly due north. This is good, he thought. Keep focusing on the minutia, work those details.

The wall in front of him was bare of all adornment other than a framed picture of the Supreme Leader Most Glorious. The wooden frame was thin, providing a flimsy border to an image no larger than a sheet of printer paper. The Glorious Leader had been photoshopped. His features were airbrushed. White teeth radiated from a hollow smile, that of a jackal gloating. His eyes looked upward and to the side, as though he were illuminated by the rising sun. Not a hair on his head was out of place. Each strand had been meticulously pulled into place in a hairstyle that looked like something from the 1950s.

Lee turned to see who was behind him. A rifle butt clipped him on the shoulder, directing his gaze back at the Leader without a word being spoken.

Lee waited. He wasn’t sure how much time had elapsed, but it felt like he sat there for hours. The day stretched on. He was hungry, tired, exhausted. If his head began to droop, a rifle butt prodded him awake again.

He noticed that a crude bandage had been wrapped around his leg. Blood soaked through from the bullet wound, but seeing how little blood there was convinced him his initial assessment was correct. Thankfully, it was barely a graze. A couple of inches to the right and a measly hundred and twenty two grams of copper-plated steel would have punched through the bulk of his thigh at a phenomenal speed, covering seven football fields in barely a second and turning his soft tissue into shredded meat. The bullet could have severed his femoral artery or broken his leg, cutting through the muscle like a hot knife through butter.

The chair had no padding and his backside felt numb.

If he moved, trying to shift his weight to gain relief, the guard behind him would strike him with his rifle.

There were dark stains on the floor, blood splatter patterns. A metal toolbox was open on a table to one side, just visible on the periphery of his vision. It could have belonged to a mechanic, but somehow he doubted that.

After an age, the door behind him opened and several soldiers walked in. He could hear the crisp sound of their boots on the wooden floor. The manner in which they strode on the hollow floor conveyed a sense of purpose, and Lee had no doubt as to why they were here: they wanted answers, answers he didn’t have. He recalled his training. Be the grey man, he reminded himself, be compliant, be submissive. Avoid eye contact. Appear broken. That won’t be hard, he thought.

A North Korean officer walked in front of him with his parade dress hat tucked tightly under one arm. His boots were polished to a brilliant shine, while his shirt and trousers had been pressed with starch. Lee doubted this was his usual dress—he seemed too formal. He was dressed this way to intimidate Lee with his authority, and Lee felt that immediately. Lee understood this man held the power of life and death over him.

“You wear no dog tags,” the officer said coldly. “You are a spy.”

“I am a civilian pilot,” Lee replied, being careful not to contradict him with the word ‘but.’ He paused before continuing, surprised by the sound of fear in his own voice. “I am Captain John Lee with the South Korean Coast Guard, a civilian organization.”

The officer eyed him with suspicion. He paced slowly across the floor, taking measured steps. Lee swallowed the lump in his throat. His hands shook.

“A government organization?” the officer asked after due deliberation, clarifying Lee’s comment about the Coast Guard.

Lee nodded. He didn’t know where to look. His eyes betrayed him, darting around the room, wanting to settle somewhere but finding no rest.

“Can you prove this?” the officer asked.

His voice was deceptively calm, almost as though he were genuinely trying to be helpful. Lee doubted his response was anything other than a facade. His head hung low, forcing his eyes to look straight ahead.

The wooden floor was rough, lacking the smooth polish he was familiar with in the West. The planks were uneven and slightly irregular in shape, leaving gaps between them. A cold draft drifted up from beneath the hut. The planks had probably been processed in some local lumber mill, perhaps a temporary camp set up to build the military base. Lee found himself trying to focus on anything other than the horror unfolding before him, but reality would not be so easily denied. Try as he might, he couldn’t ignore what was happening.

“What identification do you have?” the officer asked when Lee failed to respond. The officer bent slightly, being sure to intercept his gaze.

“Ah,” Lee replied, knowing the officer would have already seen everything the soldiers had taken from him: his survival kit, flare gun, knife. He whispered, “We don’t carry personal effects while on patrol.”

“What was that?” the officer asked. He knew damn well what Lee had said. He was tightening the noose around Lee's neck, getting him to condemn himself with his own words.

Sheepishly, Lee replied, “We leave our wallets in the ready room before going out on patrol.”

“So you have no identification?”

The officer took his time, speaking with slow deliberation, pretending to slowly piece together the puzzle.

“You are, by your own admission, from the renegade state of South Korea, having illegally entered the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea with the intent of conducting subversive activities against our sovereign nation. You are, by definition, a spy.”

Lee shook his head slowly, still looking at the knotted wooden planks that made up the floor.

The officer placed his hat on the table. The only sound in the room was that of his boots squeaking on the wood. Like the European armies of the 1800s, his ceremonial uniform was based on the concept of mounted cavalry, and Lee wondered if horses were still actively used in military operations within North Korea. He doubted that, as horses were too good a source of meat. The soft, supple sound of leather flexed in time with the officer’s steps, heightening Lee’s sense of fear.