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The titles say: Part 4 - When You're Not Feeling Holy Your Loneliness Tells You You've Sinned

"I guess it makes sense." The Gila's claws are folded, he leans forward with his elbows on his knees. "Guy most likely to fall through the cracks is the one trying to block em so no one else falls in."

"Ernesto and Maria Lucia Alvarez," Jacob's voice plays over footage of copies of immigration paperwork, "left El Salvador in 1994, fleeing organized crime violence. They were granted refugee status in 1998, and settled in Echo in 2000. They immediately pursued citizenship for all four of their children, which the youngest of their children," the shot switches to a pile of paperwork, the words 'Hearing Date' and 'Permanent Status' are visible among them. A photo of a young red wolf sits on top, "was finally granted in 2001." The photo is substituted, through a barely perceptible cut, with one of him as a young adult. "This was Leonardo Alvarez."

"Everyone knew him." The gila says. "The whole damn town's population was less than two hundred, and more'n half of that was people past retirement age, though precious few of em got to retire. There were like..." he counts on his fingers, quickly, "I wanna say less than twenty kids anywhere close to my age, before Leo's family moved in. Of course we all knew him."

"I guess it sounds a little weird that I was the snotty-faced rich brat, and suddenly I was hanging out with the refugee who didn't even speak English yet." The ram shrugs. "But like, there weren't a lot of options, you know? And most of the options kinda already hated my ass for being the snotty-faced rich brat. Plus, I was already spending all my time with," he glances around the room, and the camera changes angles, "with Chase, who I'd known forever, and Jenna was always hanging out with him, and she wanted to make a point of bringing the new kid along cause she figured her brothers' group was gonna be shitty to him. I mean, that didn't stop them, but." He shrugs.

"It's funny, looking back," the lynx says. "Relative to what happened later? Those were the good days."

The camera shows a picture of schoolchildren, at a birthday party. Among them is a young red wolf, wearing a soccer jersey and looking unsure of himself. "They didn't seem like it, at the time, but if there was a, like, version of all of us I could pick, from the past, for us to have stayed when we grew up? It'd be that."

"There was always this unusual dichotomy, with Leo," says the fox. "On the one hand, he was the oldest of all of us, except Flynn, and he was the strongest, and not afraid of physical confrontation. But he was also new. We'd all lived there longer than he had, we'd all known eachother longer. And it took a few years before his English was good enough that he could fully keep up." The camera pans over a picture of the wolf, no longer as young, at an amusement park with a young fox, grimacing in frustration as they square off at a midway game "I think he tried harder to be everyone's big brother so he wouldn't have to feel like anyone's little brother. Especially after Sydney died."

"And who the [bleep] goddamn even knows what really happened there?" snarls the Gila. "With what we know goes on in that town? Like... for all the years I've wondered, I don't even have a [bleep]ing guess anymore. [Bleep] that place, too, for taking that from me too. Can't even let me hope to find out how my friend died." He closes his eyes and shakes his head. "[bleep]. I don't just mean Syd anymore, either, do I?"

"Fast forward to high school." Jacob says, over yearbook photos and pictures of football games. "Leo is a popular, though apparently somewhat troubled student. A few disciplinary actions from the principal, mostly arising because he refuses to be closeted, even in places as unwelcoming as Payton High School. Or as Echo, Arizona."

"This is the last I knew him," Micha looks downcast. "I had more of a crush than I ever let him find out about. Maybe things woulda worked out different, if I'd had the chance to-" he stops, scowls at the camera. "Or maybe they wouldn't've. Look how things did work out."

"By the end of high school," Jacob says over a picture of a young wolf and a young otter, wearing ill-fitting prom tuxes, kissing under a decorated plastic arch, awkwardly, a little blurry with the last second motions so the photographer can't refuse to take the photo as they do. "Leo had a steady boyfriend, a heroic high school football record, and a career at the family business. Honestly, if anyone should have been well poised for as bright a future as it's possible to have in a slowly collapsing small town in post-industrial rural America, it should have been him."

"Leo and Chase broke up after high school," the fox explains. "And Leo didn't take it well, for a lot of reasons. Partly it was Leo's stubborn big brother streak. He'd gotten a lot more protective, after Sydney died, and that led to him being controlling. He sometimes couldn't find it in him to trust anyone else with anyone else's safety, even their own."

"Partly it was that Leo was always much more in love with Chase than Chase was with Leo. That led to some mismatched expectations. I think Leo assumed that Chase was willing to stay in Echo forever, if it meant being with him, the way he imagined he'd be willing to go anywhere if Chase had been the one with the job and house already set up. I don't think it ever occurred to him to ask if that's what Chase wanted."

"Partly, I'd say, it was Chase's fault. It wasn't a clean break, it wasn't, I guess, clearly communicated."

"Oh, it was agony." The Gila spreads his hands like he's trying not to touch a hot stove. "Just watching him go on about how hard a long distance relationship is, after everyone else left for college. I dunno if he was in denial, or just somehow the penny hadn't dropped. But nobody told him he and his otter were exes for like... a month!" He scoffs, heavily. The camera shows a picture of a red wolf, wearing oil stained overalls, on a cigarette break outside the back of a garage. "No, I didn't tell him either. I mean, I'm not exactly a warm and comforting sorta guy. Couldn't figure out how to do it, in a way that wouldn't sound like I was, I dunno, trying to pick a fight."

"I think I actually broke it to him." The ram stares at his own feet, shoulders hunched. "I was rooming with Chase in the dorm, for a while, and I texted about how, oh, I dunno know how Chase is taking the whole breakup you two had, dude. Should you guys maybe talk?" He sighs. "And then he just stopped responding all night. So I felt like a real piece of shit. Probably not as bad as he felt. I swear, I didn't know he didn't know!"

"Of course, high school relationships ending after high school's hardly unusual." The fox says. "But try explaining that to Leo's past, to his lack of other friends, to his protective streak that became a possessive streak, the fact he'd never made any other plans for his life, his stubborn refusal to ever admit any weakness. Add to that how what few sources of support he could have had: his parents' religion, for example, or the local community, were laughably unequipped to handle a queer relationship, if not actively hostile. Not that it would've been like him to turn to any of them." She tilts her head to one side. A rueful, calculating look fills her eyes. "Even if I'd known how bad it was--and I was away at college myself, I remember I just assumed that the relationship had run its course and that breaking up would be best, in the long run, for both of them--I don't know what I could have said that would have helped."

The camera shows a group photo. In front are a lynx and a fox, smiling pleasantly enough. To the left rear are a ram, grinning at his own dismissive gesture, and a gila, looking mildly resentful at being included. They look familiar, if a little younger than a viewer might be used to. In the center is an otter, smiling but wincing, one eye shut, presumably in reaction to the vehemence with which with he's being hugged, because the camera is already panning up and to the right, zooming in on the blissfully happy smile of the red wolf who has, for the first time in years, all his yet-living childhood friends back in the same room.

"By the time we came back for spring break," says the fox's voice, "it was already past fixing."

"I really wonder," the lynx says, "If it could have worked out if we could've persuaded him to go to college. His grades hadn't been great, but there were tech courses, stuff to do with his job. Just something to get him anywhere other than Echo. Let him meet people. But he said his parents needed him at the shop, and he was always loyal to anyone he thought needed him."

"I think that's what doomed him in the end: he was too loyal. Being loyal to you when you needed him was how he loved people. He couldn't understand love that wasn't about someone else needing him. So he'd get taken advantage of, sacrifice his future for his family, and then on the other hand he couldn't be persuaded to let go, because if he loved you, you always had to need him."

He bites his lip. "It's not fair when people get punished for what's best about them."

"I do remember thinking, when I moved to Echo," the raccoon seems immediately different, in contrast to the people who knew Leo as a child. Less involved, more awkward, as if he's had to be persuaded that it's his place to have something to say. "That the wolf next door seemed to spend a lot of time talking about how much he loved his boyfriend, how awesome that boyfriend was, how happy he was going to be when said boyfriend was done with school and could come home. I remember thinking, who are you trying to convince?"

"I maintain the Black Hole incident proper starts Saturday afternoon," Jacob's voice plays over a weekly wall calendar, posted on a corkboard. The camera zooms in smoothly on Saturday, which is marked with a large black circle. "We can time it precisely to 3:27 PM, when the cell hub in Payton loses contact with every phone in Echo at the exact same time." The cat's voice is smooth, comfortable, unrehearsed, this is a subject he knows backward and forward. "The hysteria, by which I mean the drastic increase in delusions, visions, hallucinations, and compulsive violence, begins anywhere from one to three days earlier." The calendar slides backward through the week, and when it zooms back out the days that it passed are now covered with notes and photos, push-pinned to various days. "We can't know when the first delusions of the hysteria started. There's no way to separate them from the paranormal experiences that are already the norm in Echo: which seems to support the theory that the hysteria isn't the real incident, the isolation is, and the attendant hysteria is merely an increase in intensity of the "hum" phenomenon that's always present at lower levels."

"Also, well, we only have access to the accounts of those who survived. But these are enough to indicate that the normal 'hum' disturbances increased dramatically in frequency, intensity, duration, and hostility. Most importantly, patterns within them become visible."

"I was confused," the raccoon explains, "When Chase visited, and Leo introduced him. Because I was sure I'd seen this guy looking out of Leo's living room window more than once. Gave me the creeps every time."

"When Duke was giving his batshit rant in front of city hall," the gila sneers, "about how he'd seen Chase--not his word choice, he used a lot more homophobic slurs--wandering around town at night, looking in through people's windows? That was the moment I knew there was a decent chance I wasn't making out it of this alive. Because that was nuts. Chase had been half a state away."

"The word I used at the time," says the fox, "was Tulpa."

The screen goes black, but instead of titles the text says

The Alvarez family has declined to be interviewed for this project.