The pre-dawn light felt harsh and unforgiving on our stinging eyes as we stumbled away from the emergency exit of Future World, the metallic tang of blood on the back of my tongue from running too hard. My lungs burned with every ragged breath, my legs ached with a deep, throbbing protest, and every nerve ending felt frayed and exposed, humming with residual adrenaline.
Judy was pale, her usual composure visibly shaken — a thin veneer stretched too tightly over the storm roiling within. Her lips were pressed into a hard line, but her eyes darted, unfocused, betraying the turmoil beneath the surface.. How can she be so composed, even when we are both gasping for air? However, she still clutched her datapad as if it were a lifeline, a familiar anchor in the swirling chaos of the last few hours, even though we'd failed to retrieve any new data from Volkov's server room. The park, our former playground, our place of intermittent dreams and summer jobs, had unequivocally become a hunting ground, and we were, without a doubt, the designated prey.
We didn't speak, couldn't speak, until we were several blocks away, having navigated the awakening city streets like fugitives, jumping at every passing car, bus, traincar, or early morning jogger. We finally slumped onto a cold, dew-dampened bench in a deserted city plaza. It was sadly too late for my now-wet pants, but I was able to whip them dry for Judy just before she sat down, too.
The towering, silent edifices of the financial district loom around us like indifferent, steel-and-glass giants. The first commuter vehicles were beginning to hum in the distance, their soft whirring a prelude to the daily urban symphony, signaling the start of another ordinary day for a city entirely oblivious to our night of terror and our profound, isolating grief. The contrast was a physical ache, and it is indescribable.
"He knew," Judy finally said, her voice raspy, raw. She stared at her hands, which were trembling slightly. "Volkov. That alarm, those security androids… it wasn't just a general alert triggered by our presence. He was ready for us. He anticipated someone trying to access that specific system, that specific console. He was watching. Waiting." The implications of being so thoroughly outmaneuvered by an unseen enemy settled heavily between us.
"And Zachary couldn't stop them," I added, the image of the innocent, childlike holographic boy waving his insubstantial arms futilely at the advancing, red-lit security androids replaying in my mind with painful clarity. "Whatever those things were, they were on a different level, a different network, completely outside his influence.
Volkov's security is multilayered — failsafes protecting failsafe — so intricate and deeply embedded that we've barely begun to unravel even the outermost threads. or something of that nature, guessing what just happened to us." The desperate hope we'd pinned on accessing Volkov's server room, on finding some crucial piece of data, now felt pathetically insignificant.
What could we possibly do against such a fortress and army of robots, especially now that Volkov was clearly aware someone was snooping? It's not like we are famous cat burglars or something. Our brief glimpse of that console, the complex data Judy had seen, only underscored how out of our depth we were.
The conversation, as it always did when we were together these days, eventually turned to the other heavy, unspoken dread that had been sitting with us, a cold stone in our stomachs: Scott's parents. The disconnected comm-line. The impenetrable wall of silence. The funeral that wasn't happening.
"We have to go," Judy said, her voice devoid of its usual analytical crispness, replaced by a weary, almost mournful resolve. She finally looked at me, her eyes shadowed with exhaustion and a deep, aching sadness. "We have to see them, Nick. For Scott. For the funeral arrangements, if nothing else. We owe him that much. We can't just let him… vanish without a trace, without a word said over him by those who cared."
I nodded, a cold knot tightening in my stomach, the thought of it making me feel physically ill. The idea of facing Scott's parents, of navigating their grief – assuming they even had any, a horrifying thought I tried to push away – on top of our own raw, gaping wound, was daunting. But Judy was right. It was a duty, a painful, necessary step. Scott deserved to be honored and remembered, and if his own family wouldn't do it, then we, his chosen friends, his chosen family, would have to.
Scott's family lived in one of the older residential sectors, Sector Gamma-13 — a district marked by crumbling infrastructure and the lingering scent of decay, where dim, flickering lights cast long shadows over chipped balconies and graffiti-scarred corridors, a sprawling district of towering, old apartment buildings that had seen better days, their once-fashionable facades now faded and streaked with grime, relics of a past era of city planning.
Many in the neighborhood looked like they could be condemned, yet lights glowed in numerous windows, signs that people still called these aging structures home, clinging to a semblance of life within their crumbling walls. The air here always felt a little stale, the ambient light from the city's atmospheric processors a little dimmer, less vibrant than in our more prosperous neighborhood.
As we approached their unit, number 734 on the C-block promenade – a narrow, echoing walkway suspended between two towering residential blocks, its original decorative tiles cracked and missing in places – we could hear raised voices from within. A man's slurred shout, a woman's shrill, angry retort; the ugly, jarring sound of a domestic battle raging behind a thin plywood door. It made us pause, an instinctive reluctance to step into such palpable dispute.
Judy took a deep, steadying breath, her shoulders squaring, and pressed the chime. The arguing stopped abruptly, replaced by a thick, resentful silence. After a long, tense moment, the door slid open with a reluctant, grinding hiss, revealing a scene of utter chaos.
The small living area was cluttered, overflowing with discarded food containers, empty bottles, and piles of what looked like unwashed laundry. A faint, sour smell of stale alcohol and unemptied refuse bins hung heavy in the air, flaring my nostrils to burn.
The man I can only assume to be Scott's father, a burly, heavy-set man with puffy, bloodshot eyes and a slack, unshaven jaw, glared at us from the depths of a stained, sagging armchair. A half-empty bottle of cheap liquor sat on the chipped table beside him, its label peeling. Scattered across the same table, like fallen leaves, were flimsy, discarded betting slips – dozens of them. He looked like he'd been marinating in his misery, self-pity, and resentment for days, if not weeks. He didn't speak, just stared at us with a dull, hostile indifference.
Before we could utter a word, a woman emerged from a back room, her movements sharp and agitated, pulling a battered, wheeled suitcase behind her. Scott's mother, we hoped. She was thin, almost gaunt, her face etched with deep lines of bitterness and chronic discontent, her eyes hard and cold as chips of ice. She was dressed to leave, in clothes that were perhaps a little too bright, a little too hopeful for the grim reality of her surroundings. And in her other hand, she clutched a simple, unadorned, gunmetal-gray metallic urn.
"Mrs. Rose?" Judy said, her voice astonishingly gentle despite the sour atmosphere of the apartment. "We're so sorry to intrude. We're Nick Brandt and Judy Dusza, Scott's friends. We came to talk about… about Scott. About the funeral arrangements…"
Scott's mother let out a harsh, brittle laugh that held no humor, no warmth, only a chilling, grating bitterness. She looked from Judy to me, her gaze dismissive, a flicker of something unreadable flashing across her features—resentment, perhaps, or guilt, quickly buried beneath the hardened shell of bitterness, then down at the urn in her hand as if it were something distasteful but had a small sense of longing she'd found on the bottom of her empty heart, something she couldn't but desperately wanted to be rid of.
"Funeral?" she scoffed, the word with a sneer. Then, with a sudden, shocking, almost violent movement, she thrust the urn into Judy's unprepared hands. Judy stumbled back a step, her eyes wide with stunned shock as she instinctively cradled the unexpected, and surprisingly heavy weight. A wave of heat and a cold dread washed over me – why was she handing us an urn? What could this possibly mean? I wanted to shout, to demand an explanation, but I was frozen by the sheer, callous strangeness of the act.
"There," Mrs. Rose said, her voice dripping with a venom that made me recoil, that felt like acid on my skin as my back began to shiver. "Here's your precious boy. I was about to dump his ashes out on the grass lawn below. You cared so much about him, you were his real family, apparently, always filling his head with your ridiculous dreams. So you deal with him. You figure out what to do with what's left of my disastrous mistake."
The words hit us like a physical blow. Ashes. Your precious boy. Judy's breath hitched, and her arms tightened around the urn, cradling it now as if it were the most fragile, precious thing in the universe. I stared, speechless, horrified, my mind struggling to reconcile this cold, cruel woman with the mother of my best friend, the friend who had been so full of warmth and loyalty. This couldn't be happening. This couldn't be Scott's mother. This had to be some monstrous impostor.
"Now that he's gone," she continued, her voice rising with a shrill, self-pitying anger as she gestured dismissively around the messy, squalid apartment, "there's no reason for me to stay in this dump heap a second longer. No more playing nursemaid to him." She jerked her head contemptuously towards Scott's father, who merely grunted into his bottle, seemingly oblivious or indifferent to the entire exchange. "He can rot here for all I care. I'm off to my cousin's place across the city. Find a real man, maybe one with some money to his name, who doesn't gamble away every cent we don't have. Start over. Without all this… baggage." She gave the urn in Judy's trembling arms a final, sorrowful glare, then shouldered her suitcase and pushed past us, out the door, without a single backward glance, without a flicker of remorse. The door hissed shut behind her, a sound of finality, leaving us in a stunned, ringing silence with the oblivious, still-glaring Mr. Rose and the cold, metallic, almost unbearable weight of our best friend's remains.
We didn't stay. There was nothing to say, nothing that could bridge the chasm of that monstrous indifference. We turned and walked out. Judy bowed before we closed the door, while the man just waved his hand for us to go, keeping his attention on the television.
Still clutching the urn to her chest as if it were a fragile, newborn child, her face had gone pale from shock. Once we were back on the public promenade, away from that apartment's suffocating, toxic atmosphere, the carefully constructed dam of her composure finally broke. The urn nearly slipped from her numb fingers, but I lunged, catching it just inches before it hit the grimy, unforgiving concrete. Judy sank onto a nearby graffiti-scarred utility bench, her shoulders shaking with silent, racking sobs that seemed to tear through her. I could hear the small, choked gasps she tried to suppress. I could see how her fingers dug into the rough fabric of her jeans, and her knuckles were white.
I sat beside her, placing the urn carefully, reverently, on the bench between us. My own heart felt like it was being crushed in a vise, and the air squeezed from my lungs. There were no words. What could we possibly say? Scott, our vibrant, laughing, loyal Scott, who had always been so full of life, so fiercely protective of us, so determined to build a better future, had come from that. That coldness. That bitterness. That utter, soul-crushing, unimaginable indifference. It was a betrayal so profound it almost eclipsed the horror of his murder.
It felt like hours passed, an eternity of shared, silent grief, before Judy's sobs subsided into ragged, exhausted gasps. She finally looked up, her eyes red and swollen, filled with a pain that mirrored the gaping wound in my soul.
"All this time…" My voice was barely a whisper, raw with a dawning, terrible understanding that made me feel sick to my stomach. "All this time, he was dealing with that at home? That… that wasteland of a family? And he never… he never said a word. Not a single complaint. He always seemed so happy, so damn carefree."
The memory of his easy laughter, his boundless optimism, the way he'd always shrug off any personal questions with a joke or change the subject when things got too serious – it all clicked into place, and it felt sickening. It wasn't just Scott being Scott; it was a shield. An act of incredible, heartbreaking courage to protect himself, and us, from the ugliness he lived with every day.
"He was protecting us from it," Judy said, her voice thick with unshed tears and a new, fierce, almost terrifying anger that hardened her soft features. "Just like he always protected us from everything else, from every bully, every setback. He took the hits so we wouldn't have to. And now…" She looked down at the urn, her hand gently, protectively touching its cool, smooth surface. "Now we have to protect him. His memory. His legacy. We have to find out who did this to him and why. For him, Nick. No matter what it takes. He deserves that much. He deserves everything they never gave him, everything they so casually, cruelly, threw away."
The thought of Volkov or Thompson potentially preying on Scott's vulnerability, knowing what he endured, ignited a cold fury within us. Suddenly, the clues we had, the risks we were taking, felt insufficient.
We needed more. The fury clawed at the edges of my vision, but underneath it was something heavier — disillusionment, betrayal, the sick realization that the world we thought we understood had twisted into something far uglier.
We couldn't just lash out. We had to dig deeper, strike smarter, and find the truth, no matter how rotten it was. The anger, the grief, the sheer, stunning, almost unbelievable cruelty of what we had just witnessed, it didn't break us. It didn't make us want to give up. Instead, it forged something new in the white-hot fire of our shared loss, something harder, colder, more unyielding in our resolve.
This wasn't just about solving a mystery anymore, about satisfying our own curiosity or even our abstract sense of justice. This was for Scott. For the friend who had shielded us from his unimaginable darkness, who had consistently, selflessly given us his light, and who deserved to be remembered for his incredible, loyal, loving person, not for the monstrous indifference of those who should have loved him most. When I picked it up, the weight of the urn in my hands was no longer just the weight of ashes; it was the weight of a sacred, unbreakable promise.