The city looked the same as always, with its automated voice repeating "Efficiency is progress," with its clean streets and perfect schedules. But I no longer heard the same thing. Every official word sounded like a disguise, like a hollow echo trying to cover something much bigger.
After class, Darnell stopped me with a quick gesture. No one else noticed. He made me follow him into an empty hallway and slipped a tiny memory device into my hand, no larger than a fingernail.
"Don't open it on the official network," he whispered. "If you do, everyone will know."
That night I connected it to an old console Kael had repaired in the hideout. The screen flickered, and a video file appeared.
In it, a group of hooded people gathered in a room that looked like a tribunal. Symbols covered the walls, early versions of X's emblem, still deformed, unstable. One figure stood in the center. He wasn't hooded.
It was Teacher Darnell.
But younger. Fiercer.
He spoke with a firm voice:"If we follow this plan, we will trade our freedom for false stability. The man they call X is not a leader—he is a phantom created to rule from the shadows. An excuse."
The video cut off there.
My skin crawled. If Darnell had been against it from the beginning… how did he end up as part of the system?
Kael frowned as she watched the recording."Either he changed… or someone forced him to."
Lira said nothing. She just stared at me, as if trying to read my reaction.
Before we could debate further, an alarm went off in the hideout. Red lights lit up the walls. A tracking drone had located us.
We ran through the tunnels, but this time it wasn't like before. These weren't simple patrols: they were human silhouettes in black masks, different from common guards. They moved fast, silently, as if they knew exactly where we would be.
One of them locked eyes with me for a second, and a chill ran through me: this wasn't an ordinary soldier. His eyes glowed as if not entirely human.
We managed to escape through a secondary exit, gasping for breath, but the feeling wouldn't leave me.
That night, trying to sleep, I replayed what I had seen.
Darnell had been part of everything from the beginning. X could be a person, a machine… or something worse: a void filled by many, a mask anyone could wear when convenient.
And if that was true, then the real question wasn't "Who is X?" but…Who is hiding behind the mask this time?
End of Chapter 7