The Hollow Works

Sarah Voss has one rule: never go in first.

She has turned a Mercedes Sprinter into the perfect camper. It is camouflaged to vanish into any landscape, packed with living quarters, and run by Wren, an AI she built herself. For years she has used it, along with her drone, Moth, to explore the places people forget.

Then she finds Halloway Textile Works, an abandoned factory deep in a forest where no bird sings. Its owner died wrapped in black cloth stitched through his skin. A ten-year-old boy once fell into a dye vat there and was never recovered. Thirty-one workers vanished one winter at a time. On the loading dock, someone has painted a warning: DON’T LET IT FINISH.

From the safety of her van, Sarah sends Moth through the broken roof. It films a web of black thread that fills the weaving hall, and a tall, pale, faceless thing watching from the catwalk. The thing knows her name, in her own voice. The web is almost complete, and the last gap sits exactly where she parked.