The gray, heavy September morning settling over Izmir made the massive glass greenhouses of the nursery look like ghost ships in a misty sea. Having survived the toxic mist attack from the night before, Aylin stood under the cold water in the bathroom of her Eşrefpaşa apartment, trying to wash away the chemical burn in her lungs. With every cough, she left a bloody spit in the sink, but when she looked in the mirror, that arrogant, blind woman was gone; in her place stood a bloodthirsty hunter who saw the truth in all its nakedness.
The killer wasn't out there among the elites. The killer was among those "ordinary" laborers the department crushed under their muddy boots. That worker who requested a transfer to Bodrum... Aylin was going to find that name.
At the same hours, in the İnciraltı Nursery, while Izmir's infamous wind whistled through the tops of the massive pine trees, Yekta was inside his usual invisibility cloak, his neon vest. His mind was no longer here. The Bodrum transfer document in the inner pocket of his jacket was a ticket to his new kingdom. Only a few days of procedure remained. After Hale's death and that show of force in the mist, Yekta felt like a truly untouchable god.
"Man, you've been eating my brain since morning! Press the button on that engine, pump this filth out already!"
Master Rıza's screaming voice interrupted Yekta's thoughts.
In the Biological Disposal and Spraying area at the back of the nursery stood a massive yellow vacuum truck belonging to İZSU (Izmir Water and Sewerage Administration). Two workers had lowered a thick, corrugated rubber hose into the nursery's acidic biological waste tank. The tank's discharge pump had clogged during the night.
Yekta's steps slowed for a moment. He felt a cold, invisible fist in his stomach. It had been days since he threw Cem's body into that tank. The industrial acid should have already turned that body into a liquid jelly, and then into a muddy pulp. There shouldn't be any complications.
"Master, the hose is caught on something, it's not pulling!" shouted the vacuum truck operator over the muffled grunts of the straining machine. "Is there a log down there, a rock? It clogged the mouth!"
"Give it reverse pressure, boy, let it spray it out!" ordered Master Rıza.
Yekta slowly dropped the rake in his hand. His body went rigid. The possibility of a miscalculation, a chemical flaw within his flawless ritual began to gnaw at his brain. Could the acid concentration inside the tank have dropped? Or had Cem's bones proven more stubborn than he anticipated?
The operator reversed the machine's valve. The vacuum truck let out a thick coughing sound, and then the acidic, black mud inside the tank burst out from the end of the hose onto the concrete floor with a massive roar.
All the workers stared in shock at the thing rolling to a stop on the concrete within the black, foul-smelling sludge.
The radio in Master Rıza's hand crashed to the ground. The man's face turned chalk-white in seconds, and he began to retch as he dropped to his knees.
On the concrete lay a human skull and its attached neck vertebrae, half-covered in black sludge—the acid had completely melted away the flesh but failed to fully dissolve the calcium structure. And the most horrifying part... Right atop the neck vertebrae, the deep, curved, and smooth notch left by a crescent-shaped pruning knife that had carved all the way to the bone was glaringly obvious.
"Cem..." whispered one of the workers in sheer terror. "This is Cem, the guy the cops are looking everywhere for... He didn't run away!"
Yekta's breathing slowed. His eyes locked onto that unmelting bone on the ground. When the Izmir police took that bone to forensics, they would find that signature cut mark on the neck and immediately realize that Cem wasn't the killer, but a victim of the "Elite Killer". His perfect plan had fallen victim to a handful of chemical errors.
Yekta subtly took a step back, wanting to walk to the locker rooms, grab his transfer papers, and vanish from this hell immediately. But the screeching brakes coming through the nursery's main gate nailed him to the spot.
Five unmarked police cars plunged into the courtyard simultaneously. From the lead car stepped Detective Aylin, her eyes bloodshot but standing tall. She had faint redness on her face from the toxic mist, but her gaze was as sharp as a hawk's. Behind her, Chief Inspector Selim and dozens of officers began rapidly securing the nursery's gates.
Aylin's eyes cut through the gathering crowd and locked directly onto that melted skull on the ground. Then she slowly raised her head and scanned all the workers in the nursery, especially Yekta, whose face was cast in shadow at the very back.
"Lock down all exits from the city," Aylin said, her voice blowing like a freezing wind through the courtyard. "No one steps foot outside this nursery. Including that pathetic loser who thinks he's going to Bodrum! Until we find the filth among you, the only way you leave here is as a corpse!"
Yekta's heart pounded in his chest like a war drum. The Bodrum door had officially slammed shut; he was trapped inside an official police blockade, right in his own dumping ground. But he was a man who always had a Plan B. Panicking was for the weak. Plastering that innocent, terrified worker expression on his face, he stepped back along with the other laborers.
Slipping away from the crowd while the police moved to the administrative building to take everyone's statements one by one, Yekta sneaked into the locker room. He needed to grab his spare cash and the fake ID from his locker in case he had to make a run for it.
He arrived in front of locker number 42. He unlocked it and pulled the door open.
However, what awaited him inside the locker was far more terrifying than Aylin's blockade.
Right in the middle of the shelf, resting on top of his work gloves, lay a small yellow envelope. Yekta furrowed his brows. This envelope wasn't here yesterday. No one had entered the room.
He picked up the envelope; there was something hard inside. He tore it open. Out slid a grainy, dark photograph taken with a cheap polaroid camera.
Yekta's blood froze in his veins.
The photo showed the exact moment he was turning that massive red discharge valve with his bare hands, knee-deep in water in the pitch-black sewers. In the momentary flash of light, Yekta's thick worker's raincoat and side profile were glaringly visible. Just when he thought the mist, the darkness, and Izmir's underground had completely hidden him; he hadn't been alone in those tunnels. Someone had watched him.
He turned the photo over. Scribbled with an old, red ballpoint pen in a sloppy handwriting were these words:
"Gods look very funny swimming underground, Gardener. Slicing up the elites is easy. Let's see how well you can hide your own blood in Izmir's sewers? Tonight at midnight, Hilal district, the old tannery ruins. Come alone. Either that Bodrum transfer you boast about costs you one million liras, or I personally courier this photo to your infuriated, arrogant detective." - Blind Mouse
Staring at the photo in his hand, Yekta slowly smiled in the silence of the depot. This wasn't an ordinary smile. Yes, Aylin's blockade had cornered him, but this new threat... This "Blind Mouse" had awakened the dormant, bloodthirsty beast inside Yekta like the crack of a whip.
Someone had dared to see the invisible man.
"You're not an orchid," whispered Yekta, crushing the photo in his palm. The darkness in his eyes turned into a bottomless pit. "You're just disgusting filth clogging the sewer. And filth doesn't get pruned. It just gets eradicated."
As the barking of police dogs and Aylin's commanding voice echoed outside, Yekta closed his locker. Now he had to be a flawless acrobat. By day, he had to play the pathetic worker piercing through Aylin's relentless police cordon; by night, he had to descend into Izmir's most dangerous, darkest underground labyrinths and drown this rat threatening him in its own blood.
The game was no longer aesthetic. The game was now purely about survival. And Izmir's invisible harvester had not yet unleashed his true brutality.
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and then Add to home screen.