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Escape Pod · Escape Artists Foundation

Escape Pod 1020: When They Come Back (Flashback Friday)

November 20, 2025·31 min·2 clips
An android hides her angel companion from a group of blade-armed hunters dismembering a deer-legged angel.
A stranger needs a name. The narrator almost says Chantelle, then catches the softness in it and chooses Drifter instead. Staying alive begins with that little betrayal. The city ahead might be chaotic enough to hide rival hunter groups, but this group pushes on the lie right away. They invite Drifter to the fire. Up close, the deer-legged angel looks more miserable than monstrous, blindfolded because people say its gaze can petrify androids. Nobody seems sure. The jackal-headed one explains the burning with plain cruelty: there is not enough left for anything else. Suspicion tightens around the narrator. Water moves inside them, pressing against vocal membranes until a sound feels almost impossible to keep down. They play along anyway. Waste must be removed, they say, and the answer works well enough to keep the disguise in place. The angel burns. What is left feels less like victory than a problem the narrator cannot put down: can ashes become angel again? And if ashes can return, maybe water can too. That thought makes the narrator's own body part of the question. Escape means walking without shaking. They move toward the city with every set of eyes behind them, unless that feeling is just broken brain machinery. Only distance lets the body fail. The excerpt ends after all that restraint finally shows, with one hand forced deep into the mouth and the disguise taking its price.

As heard by us

A grave, intimate return trip through ash, disguise, and the question of what can come back.

Escape Pod 1020, "When They Come Back" by Natalia Theodoridou, tracks a drifter moving toward a city where hunters, an angel, and a few guarded stories sit close to the firelight.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a slow, eerie trek toward a city where hunters, angels, and bad disguises blur into ash and doubt.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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