Glitchwalker knelt over the fresh body in the open field and lifted his knife to peel the face free. He collected faces. He kept them dried and mounted on the walls of his house, a row of stolen skins he could put on whenever he wanted to be someone else. This one would make eleven. But the field gave him nothing. Flat grass ran in every direction. No trees. No fences. No ditch to drop into. He had followed this hiker for a mile before striking, and the whole time he felt naked. Anyone crossing the rise would have seen him plain as a scarecrow. He wiped the blade on his sleeve and looked back at the sagging house on the far edge of the grass. Its roof had caved on one side. The porch tilted. Broken windows stared out like empty sockets. He had claimed it months ago because no one came near it. That was the answer. He didn't need cover in the field. He needed to bring the field to the house. So he changed his method. He dragged the hiker across the grass by the ankles and hauled the body up the crooked porch steps. Inside, he added the man's face to the wall. Then he made a plan. He would stop stalking in the open. He would lure people here instead, to a place with walls and doors and dark rooms where he could wait. He set the trap that night. He parked the hiker's car near the road with the hood up and a bag left on the seat. Then he waited in the shadow of the broken doorway. It worked faster than he hoped. Before dawn a young woman stopped to check the abandoned car. She called out. She walked toward the house. Glitchwalker took her three steps past the threshold. Twelve. The house solved everything. He no longer stood exposed. He owned the ground and the walls and the dark. For two more days he added faces and felt safe. On the third morning that safety cracked. He was cleaning his tools when tires crunched the dirt outside. He looked through a broken window. Four dark cars had stopped in the grass, spaced wide. Men climbed out in vests. White letters ran across their backs: FBI. One held up a photograph of the missing hiker. Another pointed at the parked car, then at the porch. Glitchwalker understood at once. The same house that hid him had also gathered his kills in one place. The cars, the bodies, the faces—all of it pointed here now, to one address they could surround. His shelter had become his cage. A man with a bullhorn raised it to his mouth. "We know you're inside. Come out with your hands showing." Glitchwalker backed away from the window into the dark hall of stolen faces. The doors were watched. The field was watched. He was surrounded in the one place he could not leave.